Memories
by kurushi
Summary: Hermione wakes up, bleeding, and nobody in Grimmauld Place can remember the how, the what, the why. The only clue they have is a diamond ring on her hand, and the sense of a spell gone wrong. Eventual HG/SS
1. Prologue

_Disclaimer: I don't own any of J.K.R.'s intellectual property, and hold no delusions that I do. Won't make any money from this._

_Author's Note: Initially posted on SH, but discontinued there as my later chapters aren't up to their current standards. Chapters 0-4 have been beta-d by Kate H and other friends who would rather not be named. A huge thanks to everyone who has - or will - point out any errors I've made. I adore nitpicking, and only wish I had nastier betas for this fic than I've had so far.  
_

Prologue

I felt my knees hit the floor, wincing at the dull and distant pain in my knees. I thought about premature arthritis, and all of the punishment that I'd put them through in my life. Kneeling in the library, or in the forest during that last year.

On the move, and the run, and here again. Like in that battle, ducking down.

My head spun, and my stomach heaved. I didn't notice falling and blacking out until I'd woken up again. Lying on warm wooden floorboards, sticky with something unseen, I remembered with odd clarity the sharp pain of the wood on my head.

I could hear somebody retching, somewhere. Directions were confusing and upsetting, because I was still feeling upside-down. I could feel my arm had bruised where my unconscious body had rested on it, and the painful headache that claimed my consciousness again.

There was blood in my nose. I could smell it, taste it. A red hazy fug of distress. I had to focus on the moment, in case whatever it was that had hit us was still around.

Or whomever.

Us.

I blinked with unseeing eyes, and winced at the crust that jammed my eyes shut. There was an us, of course. We'd been at the table. Breakfast?

What had I had for breakfast?

I knew that I usually knew simple things like this, and the sudden blank slate my mind had become was infuriating. I wanted to kick something, or break someone. Perhaps both. I settled for slamming my left hand down onto the wood floor.

Sticky and warm still. A drop on the back of my hand.

"Shit, she's bleeding!"

Oh. That was me. There was a dragging sound, then a rough cloth was shoved into my face. It scratched, and hurt. Pushing up into my nose, it hurt. But with every second my mind felt clearer, and I knew I had a blood nose. A very serious one, because it felt like my eyes had been sealed shut by clotted blood, sticky like syrup around the edges. Probably why I had fainted, in the end.

I might have cut my head when I fell, but it was more likely that it was just my nose. Had I been pushing myself too hard recently? Too many Pepper-up potions?

I felt very dizzy.

Also, confused. If it was just me, being my usual self, then why was someone else retching still? Why were there shuffled, subdued footsteps, and a muffled curse as somebody stubbed their toe?

Oh, stupid Ron.

He put a basin of water down beside me, so clumsily that it slopped cold all over my legs. Whoever had been trying to stem my bleeding barked out sharply that there was a first-aid supply kit under the sink.

Ron complained that he knew, and Harry spoke quietly, faint from across the room.

"You're going to be fine, Ginny."

Words and thoughts were mixed up in my head. There was a deep voice, murmuring and soft, before my face. He swapped the cloth for a fresher, softer one. A real handkerchief, and he wiped a damp, cold face-washer over my forehead.

Ron came back, and opened up the first aid kit. Following instructions, he loaded up a teat pipette and fed something bitter and sour into the side of my mouth.

Swallow, wince against the pain, and swallow again. Things began to clear again, like a camera lens. Slowly focusing in increments. Frustratingly slow increments.

Snape rinsed, dampened, and wiped the washer over my face again before I realised that I had finally recognised his voice. He had been talking to me all along, about taking the potion and how he would have everything clear soon, and that he couldn't see any cuts on my head yet, but...

Ron was helping Harry give Ginny some anti-nausea potions. My eyes were free, but stung.

I looked down at my clothes, and wished I hadn't. I had, though I don't know how, had a massive, bloody, spurting geyser of a nose. Had fainted in it, and caused a lot of worry.

Snape told me to stop it, and I wondered how he knew I'd been embarrassed, before he forced a Replenishing Potion down my throat.

Tidier and certainly more stable, we gathered around the kitchen table that was in the middle of the room. There was a foul-smelling pile of vomit in the corner, my puddle of blood, and a suspicious stain. The scent of urine soaked through it all.

None of us felt very good at all about our circumstances. We stared balefully at each other across the table, while Harry called Kreacher to make sure that he was alright, and ask for tea. Which we had been about to have, before whatever had happened. Because, I recalled, we were living here together, at Grimmauld place. Harry and Ginny in their room, Ron in his. Me in mine. Snape on a camp-bed in the study, until we checked the master bedroom for curses. Then Harry and Ginny would take that room, I would take their old room, and Snape would move into my current room.

So, my memory was less affected than I had dreaded. I could feel incidental knowledge settling back into place, like a messy pile of books pressed back against the shelf into a tidy row.

I let the heat from my teacup seep into my hands, then scratched a hand through my hair nervously.

"So," I began, "I was worst hit for some reason, but by what?"

I opened my mouth to continue, to prompt our recollection faster, but my hand was stuck in my hair.

It hurt.

Ginny helped me untangle my hair from around something small and sharp. A ring. My left hand had a ring on it. Silently, I lowered my hand to the table.

A solitaire diamond ring on my left hand, on the ring finger. I looked up at Ron with disbelief. He knew we weren't really in it for forever. We weren't even really in it for the sex, just for mutual comfort after a very messy wartime experience. Emotional healing. A stepping-stone to feeling sanity amongst the heartbreak.

It was why we didn't share rooms.

My memory appeared to have been affected far more than I had thought.

But, then, from my right, Snape swore abruptly and fiercely. He slammed a velvet jewellery box down upon the kitchen table, and then stormed from the room.

I let out a noise. It was a gasp, or a gulp, or a laugh, or a bark of cynical hate. I don't think I'll ever know what it was. I felt light and numb and confused. Ron looked as if he'd been snapped in two, and Harry looked more stunned than I had ever seen him before.

I sipped at my tea to have something to do, and then closed my eyes against the world. Whatever had happened to us, why I was wearing an engagement ring, could wait until the ground felt steady beneath my feet.


	2. Chapter 1

_[__see Prologue for my apathetic disclaimer]_

Chapter 1

We agreed, after an hour of convalescence and chilly, scared silences, to write down in dot-point form everything we knew about ourselves, each other, and the events of the last week.

There was nothing that was at all surprising to any of us. That in itself was frustrating. The presence of the box hinted that the ring, and the events surrounding it, were central to the problem. A backfired spell, or something of the sort. We were all missing snatches of time, small things that we could verify. Harry receiving some more post from the Ministry, or Ron having answered a Floo call. Very mundane and useless memory lapses. I would have no idea how much I myself had lost, how much of my own memories and self I had lost, until I tried to think of something specifically and found that blankness. Not knowing whether I would be able to recall how to counteract a curse, or which book to turn to. Who was I, if I wasn't able to access my own knowledge?

I felt vulnerable, as if I had been hobbled on an intellectual level, unable to move about in my own head. It ached.

After the emergency corroboration of minor facts, and the conclusion that we knew next to nothing about what had happened, Ron had visibly crumpled. He didn't respond to anything anyone said, and as soon as Harry had ushered Ginny up the stairs to have a hot bath and a rest, he stormed moodily out of the dining room. Several seconds later, his bedroom door slammed shut.

I realised that he had possibly invested a lot more in our silent, disconnected relationship than I had. That he was pissed off, and feeling dumped and superseded. Which was, in my mind, just fine. It was wonderful, in a bile-in-my-throat, shaking knees, sort of way. If he'd thought that _that_ had been a relationship, then I was desperately glad of Snape's ring on my finger.

We'd looked at it, and it was his. His mother's. It had her family name, _Prince_, engraved on the inside. It felt odd, something niggled at the back of my mind when I read it, but it was undoubtedly associated with Snape. More importantly, it had saved me from a relationship I hadn't known I was suffering.

Snape was sitting at the kitchen table, as we finished our tea. I fiddled with the ring, and found myself unable to imagine myself with him. "Severus" seemed such a strange name, one that I had hardly ever used. My tongue was reluctant to try pronouncing it, so for the moment he remained as "Snape". It felt like when I was younger, when suddenly changing from the age of four to five threw me completely. When words could feel alien and awkward and new.

I tried not to stare, wondering if I had ever found Snape attractive, but had forgotten. No. He was old, and drawn, and bitter. His features weren't beautiful, and neither was his way of holding himself. Old and tired and crumpled.

I hated what had happened. We'd been muddling along, in the wake of the final battle, surviving despite having no income, no housing, no qualifications. We'd found somewhere, found money for food, and enough time to just exist and regroup.

Then this had come, smashing through our brains, and upsetting our bodily functions. I must have been the epicentre, because the pressure set off that magnificently damnable bloody nose. But Ginny was still reeling, her centre of balance disturbed. If the boys were affected, they weren't letting it show. I was almost certain they were as sore as she and I were, of course.

I squinted at Snape again, who was cradling his cup and staring very deliberately at a crack in the wall to his left. Maybe it had affected my hormones? My thyroid? Maybe I really _was_ attracted to Snape, but my flustered biology was stymied and so, without memories, it was as if everything had been erased.

No, that didn't even really make sense. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and reminded myself that I wasn't a doctor, I wasn't an Auror, and self-diagnosing at this point would only torture my already distressed nerves. I needed something to do, because I doubted I'd be able to sleep at all that night.

I poured more tea, and spent four minutes trying to recall a very comforting book from my past that was trying to come to mind, but couldn't. I could simply recall that having one's brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a gold brick was...

Fuck. Another headache was coming on. I tried to relax my neck, my shoulders, and let as much tension free as I could. I wanted to avoid using any painkilling potions or spells if I could, and I was fucked if I was going to spend all night with a migraine.

As I tried to relax, Snape's voice cut through my thoughts.

"May I?"

He sounded subdued and tentative and nothing at all like the Snape I remembered. I opened my eyes, and regarded him. What on earth was he asking permission for?

May I kick you in the shin?

May I get you some biscuits to go with the tea?

May I suggest we retire early?

May I take you hard, from behind, since we're engaged and all?!

Oh, fuck. He was talking, still.

"... not if it's too, er, well. I mean, I just wanted to have a look. Not that I'd be keeping it, I don't want it back, I just... shit."

Oh. Alright then. I slipped the ring off of my finger, and passed it over. I wondered what he was curious about. My silence must have made him feel even more off-centre, because he dropped the ring as he took it from me.

"I don't like it. That it was my mother's."

Or perhaps not. I wondered why it had shaken him so much. He frowned, and turned it in his hand.

"My father beat her, I hated him."

He shut his mouth, his eyes, his entire face became closed and withdrawn. Then, slowly, he breathed deeply and opened up again.

"The ring was from the Prince family, but even so, she wore it for him – she hated it, and he liked it. I just can't imagine why..."

He drank some of his tea, and looked into my eyes with a very raw and confused expression. I felt a twinge of something inside my heart, and wondered if it was an echo of a memory of a feeling returning to me.

He cleared his throat, and stared at me, very seriously.

"Are things like that important, to you? Family jewellery, inheritance, all that?"

The question took a while to register, because I've never been one for necklaces or shiny things. Give me a good, rare book over a bracelet any day. I couldn't imagine why he'd entertain the thought that I'd want something like that. Especially if we were in a relationship, and I knew about his mother.

He sighed, and shook his head.

"Of course you didn't ask me to use it. And I got rid of it, when they had both died. I put it back in its box, and sent it to Reg-"

I leant forward, tea forgotten. "Regulus Black? So you sent it here! But that still doesn't resolve why I'm wearing it."

He snorted, and raised a very amused eyebrow at me. It was reassuring, and comforting, and warm, to be making sense of something. Maybe it had been cursed by the Blacks? I felt calmer now that there was something to think about. Something I knew.

"Oh, I can imagine..."

I blinked.

"Imagine what?"

He laughed softly, which was such an unusual and unexpected sound, coming from his mouth. Smiling suited him, being comfortable and easy and almost-but-not-quite happy. It wiped away most of the bitterness, and I felt warmer inside for seeing it. Perhaps things were returning to me. I wanted to know whether it would be emotions, or actual memories. Whether this was really us, here, now, interacting, or whether we were just leaking old lost feelings into our current dialogue.

I wondered if he ever grinned, or if he just smiled that wry half-cocked smile, when he was ecstatic. I wondered what he would look like in love, or – if he ever had been – at ease. What he looked like when he read his favourite novel.

"I can imagine myself saying that marriage wouldn't suit us. I can imagine fighting with you about it, and how stubbornly you might have found the ring, and jammed it on your finger just to show me. Not to show me anything in particular, just to stand there being inherently right at me."

I could imagine it, but only of the teenager that had protested about split infinitives in the textbook, the girl who hadn't spent hours helping to collect the gore, the fear, the corpses up into neat packages for the memorial burials. I couldn't honestly say myself how I would act. I steepled my fingers and rested my chin on them.

"That assumes that we'd already gotten to the point of being very firmly attached to each other. In love. You're quite scary when you want to be; I wouldn't do that unless I loved you, thought I could get away with it, you see. But..."

"But?"

His voice cooled, and his smile retreated into his face. As if it had closed against me. Exhaustion and bitter sufferance overtook again. I tried not to flinch, and felt my mind blank inside. I had words, had _had_ words, not ten seconds ago.

"But we're still in separate bedrooms, after all." I finished, lamely. The pause had been far too long. I regretted my words nearly instantly.

He muttered a very quiet, very distant "Goodnight, Miss Granger", and made his way from the kitchen to his room with heavy, leaden footsteps. They rang out along the wooden floors, and I stared into my half-drunk cup of tea.

I sat with cold tea for a small eternity, and went to bed myself. It was cold, and dark, and silent. I felt encapsulated within the wooden walls. Isolated. I wondered whether I'd upset him by implying that I'd want to have sex with a boyfriend, or by implying that I thought I wasn't having sex with him. Maybe it had just been my flustering, barely-thought-out delivery?

I wondered why it seemed important, to be sharing a room with Snape, when I had never wanted to spend the night with Ron. I felt confused and awful. Guilty in a way that only that one misspelt word in an exam essay could make me feel. I should have known better. I should have noticed what Ron was feeling earlier, and I shouldn't have let my conversation with Snape end that way.

I'd been rude to him, somehow. I felt cruel and insensitive and sleepless. I spun the conversation back through my mind, and every time I turned myself into a more awful person. I could imagine his face, freezing still. His eyes losing their happy crinkle and turning blank and distant. His mouth twisting in barely concealed pain.

In the silent dark of the night, I made myself into a caricature of a hideous monster. Snape became a poor, injured, innocent victim. The confusion and bumbling muted discussion became a series of evidences against the darkness and hideous bitterness that made me into a social poison.

I had poisoned Ron, and he had left the room in bitter pain as well. I felt leaden and heavy, unable to move from the mattress. My throat felt parched, and I needed to piss. I was battered, stupid, and wallowing in guilt.

Somehow, at some point, I fell asleep. I dreamt of things that I couldn't remember, but was completely exhausted and sore when I woke up. I showered before doing anything else. Drank a glass of water, brushed my hair, and sat on the cold toilet lid.

I was very relieved that I'd spent the last night feeling depressed and angry at myself, because those emotions washed away the despair and feelings of helplessness that had returned with the sunlight. I was glad that I could have scathing self-hate as a bedfellow rather than bewildering confusion.

I still had no idea, and no memory. I didn't like having porridge for breakfast two days in a row, but I couldn't remember what I had eaten yesterday. I caught my shirt on the ring when I dressed. When had I put it back on? I spun it around to feel it slide and rub against my skin, a very different sensation than I'd thought it would be, and headed downstairs.

Breakfast was quiet, and I slid in later than everyone else. Kreacher had served my plate with two pieces of toast that were getting cold, and I groaned inwardly. I was slipping, becoming less and less able to remember basic simple things. Had I forgotten about toast and porridge during or after the whole mess?

Maybe it wasn't over yet. Maybe I was losing my mind. Melting away even as I squinted at the marmalade and wondered whether or not the squishy chunky texture was worth the sweetness.

Harry smiled at me across the table, and Ron glowered. Snape tapped his fingers on the table, and Ginny said good morning brightly.

"So," Harry began, "I'm pretty certain that the ring is central to everything."

Ron sulked, and Snape snorted.

"Oh really, Potter? Why on earth would you think _that_?"

I stifled a laugh, and Harry honestly began to answer before I waved a hand at him to be quiet. I felt a very strange and unheralded camaraderie between myself and Snape. Though I had spent all night worrying and working myself up into a level of angst and self-pity that seemed stupid in the morning light of the kitchen window, and though he had stalked off upset and insulted, there was a growing warmth between us.

Or, at least, I felt there was. It was hard to think about, given everything, so I didn't try too hard. I just enjoyed the warmth of the moment, ate my breakfast, and then asked when we were supposed to be meeting Madam Pomfrey.

"How did you know that we'd called her?"

I was trying very hard to remember whether Harry had always been this dim, or if this might be another side-effect. I wanted to turn to Snape and ask him, in a low quiet voice, just so that I could hear him try to stifle his amusement. I wanted to see that strange, bittersweet and comforting smile again.

I wondered if this was how it had started, if a month of breakfasts like this hadn't gotten us to this point. I had to stare down at my plate, and remind myself that there was a chance that we weren't engaged. That there was a different reason I was wearing his mother's ring, a more plausible one.

I was caught up in feeling, and confusion. I baulked at the thought of loving him, and I felt bile rise into my throat at the thought of being somewhere without him. Seeing Ron filled me with wistfulness for what I'd never had with him, and at the same time for what I might never have with Snape.

I was in the middle of telling myself, over and over again, to focus. To remember that, most likely, I would be alone and unwanted and not needing to worry about anything but the crisis. The Incident. I should be getting the facts straight for Madam Pomfrey, and getting my mind together enough to fix this.

The longer it took, the longer things were so uncertain and strange, the worse I felt. As if my mind was made of tightly held threads. Knit into my brain over years. As if my past had snipped, cut, in utterly random places, and when I tried to tug and pull, to collect the fallen threads, I just came apart even more.

When Madam Pomfrey arrived. I felt ragged around the edges. I was losing my grip on things.

She took Harry first, into the sitting room, for a checkup. I swallowed, throat dry, and followed Snape down the hall. He'd said something to Ron and Ginny about "research", and "call us when it's our turn". My head felt fuggy again, heavy and sweet and rancid. My feet fell loudly on the floor, and echoed in my mind. I wondered why nobody had mentioned how loud my feet sounded.

I realised that I might be in my own mind, hearing this. Slowly being locked away from everything, anything. Drowning in this absence of thought. A dizzy wave blurred over my vision. Brownish greenish darkish wriggling static. Was that my eyes? Losing the neural connection to my eyes might mean very dire things. In my gut, in an instant, without any active thought, I knew it was over for me. I had never felt so certain of my own death before. Blanketed in an awareness that was as biological and real as hunger, or the need to breathe.

I felt a hand on my elbow. Warm. He led me into a room with books in it, and sat me down. I could smell the old pages and glue, the dust. It grounded me a little. He rubbed my arms and made noises that faded into the cotton wool air around my ears until other things started soaking back in. When my vision cleared a few moments later, his face looked worn and panicked.

"Fine," I said, tasting the words.

The world was fading back in, in increments. Madam Pomfrey was bustling towards the room, and Snape was pressing a hand to my forehead.

"I said, I'm fine."

Then I felt pressure build behind my skull again, and it was dark. I could taste blood against the back of my throat.

When I woke up, again, I was thoroughly sick of falling asleep and waking up again. The repetition and tedium were wearing thin. Snape was sitting beside me. I could hear the sounds of people living and moving throughout the house, and realised I was back in my bed. The sheets were crisper than I was used to, more tense. Somebody had tucked the edges in, strapping me down against the mattress. I tugged on them, to get a bit more slack, as he spoke. I was glad to discover that words were making sense again.

"Failed Memory Charm."

I blinked, and paused in my struggle with the sheets.

"My father," he spat out, "wasn't the nicest of people." He drew in a deep, shaky breath. After a few long moments, he continued.

"But my mother's parents, the Princes, were worse. When he asked for their daughter's hand in marriage, they offered to let him use a 'family heirloom' as an engagement ring..."

I sat still, letting the information sink in. I could guess the rest of this story. His tight jaw and defensive posture confirmed it. I imagined that he was feeling far worse than I had the night before, in bed, but I couldn't feel sympathy for him. I was empty and clear inside.

"You knew this, didn't you?" I asked in a hollow voice. "You fucking well knew it from the moment you saw that ring on my hand!"

He hung his head, and stared at his fingers, lying limply in his lap.

"I don't know."

I fumed, felt a burning fiery fury building in my chest,filling my emptiness.

"You don't know?! How can you _not _know! Surely you did, or you didn't, and it's as simple as that."

He shook his head, lamely, and I slumped back against the pillows.

"So, her parents wanted her to forget? To reject him? What?"

I stared at him, and swore.

"Fuck. I don't care. So it was taken off, or she never wore it, or whatever. And it got onto my finger, somehow, triggering an out-of-date or botched memory spell, and... and..."

I couldn't speak, just couldn't speak. Because he'd been holding the felted old jewelery box in his hand, when we all regained consciousness. Either he'd deliberately done that to me, which was little better than rape, or... what?

He didn't meet my eyes, and I felt cold as the strange equanimity that had grown between us seemed to leech away. I felt too tired, and frustrated, and adrift to put up with his apparent guilt or helplessness. I felt sick of fainting and forgetting and faltering.

"Forget it," I snapped. His head jerked up, eyes wide and confused.

"I can," I explained in a sharp and grump tone, "demand payback or apologies when we've fixed this. When we know exactly how and why you fucked me over. Get out, tell the others about it, take the ring."

I wriggled it off of my hand and threw it on the duvet with what I felt was entirely warranted anger.

"I'm sick of being sick. We'll fix this, and then we'll talk."

He nodded silently, and stood. He was unreadable, his face partly hidden by his hair. I wondered what on earth he was thinking, and why he had chosen that exact moment to tell me.

Maybe, like my mind, his was muddled. He didn't know what he knew until he deliberately sought it out. Maybe he'd only just now thought of it, while I'd been out.

As he reached the door, I called out after him, "You know, I don't hate you."

I regretted it instantly. He turned a little, so I felt pressed to explain.

"I mean, I like you. If this was all some twisted attempt at a proposal, in the end, you should know. I'll be giving you a well deserved punch. You could've just asked me."

He frowned, and entered the room again, slowly and deliberately.

"What? What on earth do you?"

"I mean," I said, much more calmly than I felt inside, "That you're possibly the only person in the world that I'd consider marrying. Not, of course, that I've considered marriage, as such. But, if I did – and we've spent enough time in this place for me to know – you'd be at the top of my list."

I swallowed, and appended, "Not that there's much of a list, really."

He stood, speechless, and I felt like a bigger dork than I had ever felt before in my life. I wished that another fainting spell would come, or even just Ginny with some chattering nonsense. Anything to interrupt the moment.

"Right. Well, then." He spoke in very clipped words, as if it was taking all his effort to hold his tongue against other words. He shuffled a little.

"I'll see you later. Then. I'll take this downstairs." He waved the ring absently in the air, far too nonchalantly to be anything other than a visible misdirection from himself.

"Weasley should be here by now. Curse breaker."

I nodded, trying to fight the blush that was boiling beneath my skin. Bit my tongue and tried to sink further down into my pillows. He turned again, with jerkier movements, and clopped down the hallway and stairs in his heavy shoes. I closed my eyes, and wished the world away again.

***

Being sleepless during the day, when you are not really supposed to be asleep, and you can hear everyone else in a house making tea, being rowdy, and using the bathroom is far more difficult than being sleepless at night.

I don't think I'd ever realised that before. Lying in the afternoon sunlight, with a letter of caution from Madam Pomfrey on my bedside table, I was bored. My feet itched to walk somewhere, suddenly. I missed trees and the air. I didn't need to eat, or use the bathroom, and hearing everyone else moving, living, consuming, using, was inexhaustibly irritating. I wasn't allowed to participate in the research on the ring, and Snape had devoutly avoided my sickbed. I wanted him to come and talk to me. I was so mortified that I never wanted to see him again.

There was no way that Snape would have ever given me the ring, not knowingly. I tried to put the pieces together in my mind, fighting against the ragged edges of my foggy brain. The botched memory charm. My own, lovely, stupid curse. Obviously, his mother hadn't put it on, because she'd married Snape's father. So it had sat, with a bunch of other magical paraphernalia, somewhere in their house.

Until it had ended up amongst the bits of the Black household, sent to Regulus Black. Hidden with all the other cursed junk in the cupboards. Snape wouldn't have sought it out, he had no reason to. He'd gotten rid of it. So only Harry, Ginny, or Ron could have possibly...

Oh cunting flipping hell. Ron, you stupid arsehole. I knew it the second that I tried to think it through. I was immensely upset with myself; Occam's Razor certainly should have been applied to this situation much earlier. I swore loudly at the ceiling until Ginny came in, looking concerned.

"H-Hermione?"

I frowned at her.

"Are you alright?"

I grit my teeth, and forced a smile. "Fine. Just a bit upset. I..."

I trailed off, thinking. Ginny sat on the bed beside me, and chattered about how Bill was here, now, and was looking at the ring. Figuring out how to lift the charm without ruining any of our minds in the process.

I listened, and thanked her. She brought me tea. I told her quietly and succinctly over ginger biscuits to tell her brother, Ron, that if I ever heard from him again I would take legal action against him. Said that if he was confused, he'd remember why when the charm was lifted.

I would have refused to talk to anybody for the rest of the afternoon, if they hadn't all been busy elsewhere anyway. As it was, I lay in bed and hated Pomfrey for trapping me there. Hated Ron for possibly ruining my mind. Hated Snape for being the most inoffensive and useful person in the house.

I spent half an hour daydreaming about violent pain, and death. I was a Kindly One, if only in thought alone. I imagined what Ron would say when I told them all that I was moving out. I would silence his protestations with a curse for eternally ingrown toe-nails, or confusing and inconstant rashes. I would pick up a hot poker from the fireplace and drive it through his eyes. Mop up the viscera with his Order of Merlin.

Or, maybe, Snape would be a gentleman. I daydreamed that Snape would raise a hand, calmly take the poker away from me, and punch Ron in the gut. Walk me off to find an affordable flat with space for bookshelves.

I fell asleep proud with justice, and woke up embarrassed. My daydreams had been silly and childish, and I felt in much better mental control of myself than I had in memorable history.

I could remember. If I focused, I could remember Ron kneeling on the kitchen floor before me, his hand reaching for mine. I hadn't paid too much attention to him, because Snape had been lifting something from the kitchen table with a look of incredulous disgust. I had been interested, because Snape usually saved that awful face for Harry, Neville's potions, and any jokes about Death Eaters.

The ring had been cold when it slid onto my finger. Presumably, as I could recall it all clearly, everything had been resolved. Charlie had lifted the curse, and if I wandered downstairs I would run into whoever was still here. I didn't like the thought of that, so I found my wand, locked the door, and read a book until people had stopped making food in the kitchen. Until well after the last hands had knocked at my door.

The hallway was dark. I fingered my shrunk luggage in my pockets, and tiptoed as quietly as I could down the stairs. When I reached the door, I realised that somebody was standing in the shadows. Snape.

"You're late." He said. I shrugged, and leant against the wall. If he wanted to talk to me, he'd have something to say.

"I thought you might like to have this," He suggested, holding out the ring. "You have, of all of us, earnt it. I myself want to be rid of it as soon as I can. But I thought you might want it, as a badge of proof, or something like that..."

He trailed off, seeming awkward. I casually took the ring from his hand and slipped it into my pocket.

"A warning, more like it." I joked, "To not let idiots get too close."

He laughed, once, softly, and moved to let me make my way through the door.

"Take my old room, the bed will be comfier," I suggested. Then, with as much strength as I could muster, I squared my shoulders and stepped out into Grimmauld Place.

I strode to the end of the street before apparating to a phone box. With every step I felt emptier, and bereft, though I couldn't really say what I had been hoping or waiting for. The entire episode felt final. I was finished with Ron, and any misconception I had had about my relationship with Snape had been clarified with the ease of a lifted spell. I was complete, sane, and off to find somewhere safe and new to sleep.


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I lay back against my new duvet and stretched my toes into the sunlight. Sleeping in an improvised huddle of cushions and blankets and my new, fluffy, warm, single-bed duvet was much more fun than I had expected. I could have laid beside the window of my cousin's council flat all day if I hadn't felt the necessity to find a more permanent occupation than "unemployed", and a more stable residence than "used puddle of soft furnishings". It was warm, and there were books.

The sounds that a city usually makes outside a cheap council flat seemed novel compared to the general sombre gloom of Grimmauld Place, the noises of the emergency ward at St Mungo's, and the sounds of the forest at night within the magical tent. I didn't end up segueing into thoughts of my childhood here, or the war. I could use the screams and shouts, the cars and buses and after-school clatters of children to punctuate my day, connect me to an unknown world. It kept me busy, imagining the sources of these noises. Inventing a universe around an upset teenage girl, or the smell of a curry dinner in the stairwell at night.

I needed things to think about, while I boiled the kettle or got myself food. I immersed myself in Muggle novels for a month. Stories about computer AIs, bombs on trains, and endless fantasies about vampired and aliens. Until, stretching luxuriously in the warmth of the afternoon, and feeling exultant at the thought that even these dingy places were graced by the rarest golden summer afternoon in London, I realised that I had been running from everything.

It washed the happiness from my afternoon, and brought it all back heavily down on my shoulders. I decided to rinse it away in the shower, bringing myself at least four minutes more of allocated peace.

I'd set my owls up to redirect to my parents' house. It was convoluted, and I still wasn't quite sure how the spell worked, but I was glad that it did. I'd told Mum I'd had a messy breakup, and that if they came back from Australia to find any nasty letters addressed to me, to ignore them.

I assumed that Ron, or perhaps Molly, had sent Howlers. I wondered if the neighbours had heard them, and what they had thought. I decided that I was probably better off not knowing.

Then I gathered my hands together in my lap, sat on the floor, deliberately away from my warm soft haven of books, and stared glumly at the worn rough carpet. I was dodging things mentally that I would have been desperate to have been aware of, when I had still been affected by the Memory Charm.

I needed to talk to Ron. Which was going to be painful. Should, rather than needed. For Harry's sake, rather than my own. In retrospect, walking out in the middle of the night hadn't been the best course of action. In my defence, I hadn't known that Snape had left that night. I hadn't expected Ron to think that I'd run off with him, but then I hadn't expected Ron to think that we were in a close relationship in the first place.

He'd proposed. Fucking proposed to me. I'd run, and left, and spent that first night in the Leaky Cauldron. He'd shown up the next morning, heartbroken and enraged alternately, demanding that Snape show himself.

I'd apologised, and pitied him, and agreed that I'd been a heartless bitch, and shut my door against him as quickly as I could. I'd wanted to slap him, to scream. To tell all of Diagon Alley that we'd agreed to nothing verbally. That we'd fucked, in the dark, quickly and without love. That we'd never spoken, aside from our usual friendly banter, which we shared more with Harry than each other.

I'd thought we'd both move apart, in time. That we'd heal our emotional trauma from the battle, and learn in our bodies as well as our minds that our losses and scars could never be healed by sex. I'd tried to talk to him about it. I'd been trying to leave him, cut it off, and still be friends.

I wanted to set his jeans on fire, and claw my face open with my fingernails. Scream as I bled, tearing at my hair. We'd had a deal, an unspoken pact. We'd had bitterness and emptiness, and how _dare_ he pretend that it was worth marrying.

"Here is a suit, will you marry it?" I asked the empty flat. I felt hateful and spiteful and bitter. Circe on her island. Penelope unweaving her own work at night. I wanted to spin and burn and collapse and rot in a glorious finish.

It wasn't fair that I'd survived. Better people had died. People who could love, or feel. People who were more to the world than regurgitated knowledge and a hollow empty body. A quick lay, numb and easy.

Tonks would have been breathing, and clasping people to her breast. Smiling and laughing and loving. I felt drained and sick of it all. I wanted to throw it all up, and walk away forever.

I missed Snape.

It was survivor's guilt, I knew, and stress-related anxiety. Depression was the numbness, and self-destructive tendencies. But knowing and being are very different things. I wanted to forget everything, and just exist again, without questions or thinking myself into these loops.

I wore the ring on my left hand, as if I was engaged to the concept of a complete loss of self.

This wasn't working. I wanted to go lie back down in my duvet, but the sun had moved. Cloudy again. Tears pressed against the back of my throat and my eyes, until I slapped my hands down decisively on the carpet.

I couldn't stay like this. I had to find something to do with my days, and somewhere to live where I could use my magic again. Throw myself into learning, and forgetting. I knew, theoretically, that I could get myself one step further, to pull myself back.

Harry was probably worried. I'd better owl him, all things considered.

It was surprisingly easy after that internal dialogue to get dressed, pick up my wand, and walk to the bus stop. The bustle of public transport, and the length of the trip there, gave me the time and atmosphere I needed to compose a letter.

When I'd sent off my _Dear Harry_s and So Terribly S_orrys _from the Diagon Alley post office, I settled myself with a simple Notice-me-not charm at a cafe to plot. I counted out my last galleons, and decided I could afford lunch, just this once.

Well, a plate of toast, at least.

The pot of tea I'd ordered arrived hot, and with a nice amount of milk. But I couldn't survive on tea alone, or toast. I needed an income. Work. And once I had work, I needed somewhere to live and actually be able to perform magic. I wouldn't be able to afford my own house, at least not at first. I didn't have enough of a grasp on the pound-galleon exchange rate to even contemplate trying to understand mortgages.

That I would work as a witch was unquestionable; I'd get a far better wage, because intelligent witches – witches at all, after the casualties of the war – were harder to come by than unemployed Muggle girls.

I wondered if there was much of a young sharehousing community in the wizarding world. If anyone would have me. If I'd be able to find people I'd tolerate. If I could afford to think about it at all, when I wasn't employed yet.

The tea was nice, but the toast was dry and too cool to melt the butter properly. I found a copy of _The Daily Prophet_ discarded on a nearby table and nicked it. I'd never really paid attention to whether or not there were classifieds, or if they might contain "help wanted" or "to let" advertisements.

But, yes, there they were. A very small listing, to be sure. Far more obituaries, which was understandable. Curses and wounds and other fallout from the Death Eaters. Suicides, some of them, surely. Not that they'd say as much in the paper, but still. I wondered how many real victims of emotional trauma there were. Did we even have an official counselling service?

The "Help Wanted" section was relatively bare. I felt a bit let down, but realised that with such a small population, where anyone can transfigure most things they wanted, that the wizarding economy must be very small. There were menial jobs, casual jobs. Night staff. I blanched, and finished the pot of tea entirely before I turned the page to risk seeing the advertisements for P-Z.

And then, there it was. Small font, in one simple sentence. _Wanted: Ollivander seeking intelligent youngster for low-pay, long hours, and Ministry approved apprentice contract._

I supposed that with a name as notorious as Ollivander, contact details were somewhat redundant. It seemed a good, if the only, place to first attempt to find work. Feeling silly, I folded the paper and walked down the street for perhaps three seconds before I was pushing open the door and stepping into the dark and musty shopfront.

Almost at once, as if he'd been expecting me, Ollivander shuffled forwards from the gloomy darkness in the back of the store, and set a very thick book down on the table.

"I want," he stated solidly and immovably, "for you to read this, cover to cover. I'll have enough work teaching you the finesse of the art without having to brief you on basic theory. When you've absorbed it all, I'll expect you to be here from eight every morning, no later, no earlier. Lunch at eleven, bring your own or buy it on the street, you're not allowed to eat in the shop. Except for biscuits. I prefer Monte Carlos, but will accept anything other than those pissy wafers."

I blinked at him, and cleared my throat. That was just uncanny. I knew that he remembered everyone's name, wand, the year they bought it, but it was still unnerving. I supposed that, given a limited number of surviving adolescents of the appropriate age, and the very public circumstances of most of my graduating year, it wasn't too difficult for him to predict my arrival.

He'd probably seen me sitting at the cafe, through the glass of the front window. If I squinted, I could almost make out the cafe as a series of brown blobs. Irrespective of how he'd known, for I refused to be shown up by his mystic and theatrical airs, I planted my hands firmly on the counter, and met his old rheumy eyes with my own.

"The apprenticeship contract?"

He smiled, and shrugged his shoulders. "I sent a copy to you, weeks ago. Assumed you'd need a job, and my desire to have a competent apprentice could only be fulfilled by somebody as capable as yourself. If you've lost it, I've a spare out the back."

He hobbled out, then in again, and we signed the parchment where it mattered. He nodded, slipped it into his robes, and brushed past me towards the door.

"I'll be back in an hour. Don't expect any customers. Off to set up the banking, you'll get the first month in advance. You'll need it, to set yourself up. I don't want it being said that the employees of _Ollivander's_ are roughing it in Muggle accommodation, oh no."

He bustled away, and I was left to sit, baffled, at the small counter in front of the book. He'd been expecting me.

I felt a little miffed, and just stared at the book. Was I really that predictable? I hadn't seen him since...

Well, it had been a while. Things had happened. I closed my eyes against the last year, and wished for another cursed ring. I twisted my ring around, three times. My new personal ritual. My wish for forgetfulness.

I should have been reading my mail; I kept it in my bag of course. But, I still didn't want to. To chase away the thought of Harry's and Ron's letters, fuming in a soft pile, I opened the book to the introduction.

The intricate nature of wands, the importance of balance and symbolism as well as magical power to their construction was romantic. Interesting. Compelling. I resolved to finish the first chapter, and make a list of questions to research, by the end of the day.

Mr. Ollivander had been right; nobody entered all afternoon. When he returned, and began poking about in the back room, opening and closing drawers, I decided that this was perhaps the most peaceful place in the world. Even more so than any of the libraries I had visited. Dark, musty, unclean. Disorganised and so chaotic, yet everything had its own place and purpose and logic. It felt like I was cocooned within my own heart, my mind. A psychological womb. I fit, somehow.

"I'm going to be here until I die, aren't I?" I asked, closing the book and lifting my head to look up at the cacophony of boxes. I heard a dry chuckle from the back room.

"Do you mind, too much?"

"Not at all." I stood, stretched my stiff legs, and walked about as much as I could in the small cramped place. "May I look around a bit?"

He grunted in what must have been assent. I let my fingers trail over the boxes, dragging clean trails through the dust that covered some of the older ones.

"Pick a good one," he cautioned. I paused, froze.

"Pardon?"

"A _good_ one, I said. You don't need a wand for a schoolgirl, after all, anymore. You've changed, so have your requirements."

"Oh." It made sense. I had more power, was older, and given the last few months, was a very different person. I doubted that the Hermione who had stood here, excited about magic and essays and homework could have ever imagined a dry fuck in a street alley with someone who was not-quite a childhood friend anymore.

I contemplated the boxes, and the taste of the dust on my tongue. I thought about who I was, where I was going, and I closed my eyes.

"Oh hurry up," Ollivander finally complained, "I don't want to rush you, but you've kept him waiting for quite some time now. Take the book, and come back here, twelve, tomorrow. You can choose it while I have lunch."

Him? There was indeed a gloomy, vague shape against the dust of the shop window. I squinted, and felt a suspicious surge of happiness and hope. Only one person could be that tall, and that looming. I hefted the book against my hip, waved a silent goodbye to the shop, and slipped outside into a cleaner, harsher, stark world.

The air felt sharp, crisp and angry against my skin. I was already wishing that I could return to the soft-edged warmth and intimacy of the dark rows of wands. But Snape was there, nodding silently and lifting my book from me. He didn't even brush against my hands, or sleeves, but withdrew. He was a cold figure, as we started to walk along the emptier streets towards the pub.

"I've missed you," I tried, first off. He didn't respond at all, and I sighed. And followed.

"Did you meet him at the bank, today, then? Is that how you knew I'd be here?"

He grunted, and we walked on. Our feet echoed off the cobblestones and our cloaked shadows flashed against the shopfront windows of the stores that flanked us.

"I haven't read my mail at all." I rushed out, realising as I spoke that he had most probably sent me letters, that he was waiting for some response or reaction from me, an answer to a correspondence that I was unaware of.

"I mean," I continued, "I set it up to be sent to my parents' empty house. I didn't want to... Harry and Ron would probably... and Molly..."

I trailed off, and cursed myself inside. I felt lame and impotent and adrift again. Not in an uncomfortable way. I just felt that whatever I said, whatever I did, Snape would stand there immovable. That the small moments of amicability that I had missed far more than I should have were barred to me.

I wished, more than anything, that Ron would feel this way when I was talking to him. That he would trail off, seeing the distance between us, and just give up and go home. Give us both time to recover.

But, I realised, during my drifting thoughts Snape had started laughing softly. Not a friendly, relaxed laugh, but a nervous and slightly frantic one.

I stopped walking, and looked at him for a moment. He turned to me, and shrugged.

"You haven't read any of it? At all?"

I shook my head, and allowed an embarrassed laugh of my own to escape.

"I've read a sum total of none. If I'd known you'd sent some, I would've, though."

"Oh?" He smiled, wryly.

"Of course! What's this 'Oh?' nonsense? All things considered, you're probably the only friend I've got, aside from blood relatives." I pretended to be scandalised.

We walked on in the darkness, slower now, easier, towards the Leaky Cauldron.

"Not," I quickly amended, "to presume anything on your part. I've just, more or less, burnt all my other bridges."

He snorted, and as we had arrived, pressed the brick that let us into the Cauldron's courtyard.

"I'll drink to that." He said, wryly, and led the way into the pub.

The pub was comfortably dark and dingy. I considered the Wizarding world, which seemed to pedestal these old-England fuzzy-lens-filmed shops and eateries. There was not, and I doubted there would ever be, a new and flash magical nightclub. We settled myself and my book at the end of a large table, and Snape quickly ordered some drinks. I didn't pay attention, really. I'd never had the opportunity to try that many drinks. I'm sure he knew better than to order me Butterbeer, with all the connotations it had for me of Hogsmeade weekends and classmates.

He sat, and we were silent for a little while. I was still reeling from the speed at which things were catching up to me, as if when I'd opened the flat door I'd released the tension in a large rubber band. He was probably trying to un-associate a month's worth of unanswered correspondence from his mind. I could imagine it, staring at the circular marks in the stain of the table. Wondering exactly what he'd said or when he'd written, and what would be pointlessly stupid to mention or ask about.

I decided to save him the trouble, and started getting things out of the way.

"So, a quick catch-up so save on awkward questions. Not reading mail to avoid dealing with Ron, homeless but sharing with a cousin, and until about six hours ago unemployed. Surprised and touched to find that you've kept in contact."

The drinks arrived, and I blinked down at the glass in front of me. He'd ordered, of all things, a glass of pineapple juice. I hadn't been aware that wizards juiced anything other than vegetables entirely unsuited to the Muggle juicing process, and had assumed it was an inherited snobbery. He lifted his, the same as mine, and I lifted mine in response.

"I," he began, "Left when you did, to avoid Weasley at breakfast. I'm assuming he will have assumed far worse than the truth, so you should keep that in mind when you read his letters."

He grimaced, and drank some more.

"Moved into Spinner's End, a decrepit hole, but free and therefore affordable. I've spent a month being rejected from every place I've applied to for work, and composing letters to you fueled by increasing levels of social anxiety. Burn them, please."

I smiled, laughed, and nodded. I was planning, now, on apparating to my old place and finding those letters as soon as I left his company. By the sour face he made as he settled back in his chair, I could tell that he knew exactly what I had planned, and that he had no way of stopping me. It soon passed, though. Groups of ministry officials on after-work social drinks and store-owners chatting about the day's take created a hubbub that gave our company buoyancy. Without having to talk, or stretch for interesting conversation, we could float in silence at the end of our day and feel companionship.

"I feel comfortable," I said, quietly. Half hoping that I hadn't been heard above the noise of the crowd.

"Oh?"

Damn. I sighed deeply and continued. "Even at Hogwarts, before everything went wrong. Sharing a dorm with the other girls, I always felt a little on-edge, a little set-upon. Like I had to find a way to retreat."

I paused, and he waited patiently.

"I've never felt completely at ease. But today, in Ollivander's and now here, I feel comfortable. It's as if I've spent my whole life wearing shoes the wrong size, and have only just now realised how it feels. To not feel itchy and hedged in, and uncomfortable."

I took a deep breath, and clenched my toes within my shoes, trying my hardest not to blush. Snape watched me with his half-smile in silence for a few minutes.

"That," he said finally, "Was quite a soliloquy."

I had finished my juice, and was confused. Was he laughing at me, or sympathising?

"I," he breathed deeply, "I feel like that, a little. More like I have been pushed, suddenly, from a world that I knew into a warmer, more comfortable one. A universe with armchairs. But," he drained his own glass, and rubbed his hands along his forearms as if he was cold,

"But, it doesn't feel right. I feel as if any moment now, someone will walk up, point at me. Shout that I'm not someone made for a slow demise with scones and tea. That I should be arrested and removed from comfortable society."

I didn't know what to say, so I sat there for a few minutes. I supposed that Wizarding society in general was still scarred by the past. Having seen Remembrance Day ceremonies, and veterans twitching in supermarkets during my childhood, I wondered if the small community we lived in would ever recover. If the memories would ever heal, or if like me some of us would crave an absence of thought.

Whether there would be an increase in the misuse of memory modification spells. If there was any psychological treatment available. As I had learnt at work, from that book, a magic-user's psyche was intimately intertwined with their magic. Fear or pain or anger could trigger unconscious magic, and a change in temperament or mood could affect the relationship between a wand and its' user.

"I suppose," I ventured, "that the howlers and letters don't help. You haven't found a spell that works, to keep them away, have you?"

He grunted, and allowed his frown to melt into a smile again. His face was so changeable, so inconstant, I could hardly believe that he'd seemed monolithic and static during my school years.

"I like to take it as a compliment," he explained, "proof that I was very good at what I did."

I felt awkward and apologetic.

"I'm sorry, that I brought it up again."

He blinked. "What? No, no, don't be. There isn't anyone that I can really talk to, at all. With you, it comes easily. Just happening."

He stared down at the table, his empty glass.

"It's late," he mumbled, and I nodded. Sucked my breath in between my teeth, and pulled my book towards the edge of the table.

"I'd better head home. I have to read some of this, before I come back in to work."

We parted, and I apparated to the designated safe point in my suburb, then trudged up the stairs and made my way inside. My skin felt hot, and my mind confused. Mixed in with jumbled memories of everything, and the slow trickle of information that I had absorbed, were new thoughts and emotions that I didn't feel quite ready to assimilate into my consciousness.

Instead, I ate some toast and settled down in bed to immerse myself in the rich and novel history of wand making.


	4. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I woke up in my nest of bedding, covered in crumbs and books. I could see that the note I had left on the bench, letting my cousin know that I had found a job and would bring some cash home tonight had been replaced by an uneaten banana and the milk-soggy remnants of a half-eaten bowl of cereal.

I would have been reluctant to leave the warmth and familiarity of the flat for the associations and memories and oddness that would accumulate while I visited my parents' house, empty and dark and uninhabited, but I was impossibly curious about what Snape might have written to me.

The garden was a little overgrown and dilapidated. The door was faded, and everything looked a little skewed. Greyer, shorter, taller. I sneezed my way down the hallway, disabled the wards I had set, and banished the dust from the floor and my socks into a neat, tidy pile in a corner of the dining room.

I eyed the fridge, but decided not to risk it. I turned on the kettle, and trudged upstairs to my old bedroom. Letters were in mounds rather than piles, spilling over the bed and desk. I was glad that I couldn't see my room, my old books, all dusty and unused and strange through my estrangement from my childhood. I raised my left hand, open, and my right hand holding my wand. Steeling myself for the potential torrent of envelopes, I spoke.

"_Accio_ all letters from Ron Weasley."

By the time I had collected my mail from Ron, Harry, and Snape, leaving the rest for another day, the water in the kettle had cooled again. I busied myself making tea, without milk of course, and shuffling the letters from Ron and Harry beneath those from Snape.

With any luck, it would turn 11.30 before I reached the end of Snape's pile, and I could put off the confrontation with Ron's anger and Harry's torn sympathies for another day.

The first letter was simple, an apology warning me that Snape had left that same night, and that Ron might misinterpret. Regrets, etc.

The second letter was bumbling and clumsy compared to the first. Muddled and confused. It almost mentioned conversations, but fell shy of referring to any exact times, places or topics.

The third letter apologised, very formally, for his getting so drunk and abstract. Said, in a reserved and cautious way, that he would like to continue our acquaintance.

I could feel my heart almost breaking at the thought of a tired, cold, drunk, lonely Snape in his house. Little money, less hope. Our situations were very different but I could understand, sitting in my family dining room, exactly what it could feel like to be alone with the past.

I found it a little strange, feeling as if my only approachable friend had once been my teacher. It must have been stranger for him, to have known me when I was pre-pubescent, and then hormonal. Difficult to shake the memories or separate Hermione the adult from Hermione the petulant child.

The next letter was more like himself, warm and wry. It rambled about money troubles, the irritating children that wandered past his garden on the weekends, and on the flaws in all of his mail-screening attempts. He teased me, about how low my standards, how desperate I must be, to have him at the head of my "potential husband" list.

I scoffed, and smiled, and forgot about dawdling. Forgot about not wanting to see Ron's handwriting before work. Feeling a little clandestine and silly, I read Snape's letters until I ran out of them, and had to apparate and run to reach Ollivander's in time.

Given how integral the construction of wands was to all magic use, and how personal wands themselves are, I was feeling growing levels of ire towards the set curriculum at Hogwarts. How could all those hours of charms and transfiguration and defense lessons presume to "teach" people how to use their wands for life, when the most important parts of wand-care and the evolution of the magic user and the magical conduit were entirely omitted! There was no reason why a course on wand theory couldn't be incorporated into first year, and advanced theory offered as a later-year option.

For example, understanding why Ollivander only used phoenix feathers, dragon's heartstrings, and unicorn hairs, instead of even more exotic and expensive cores. The magical power of the core was less about the material, and more about the _perception_ of the material. Magical energy can be channelled through any magical beast or being. We could use house elf toenail clippings, or dried blast-ended skrewts, but the power and magic is only half the purpose of the core. The core must resonate with the user, and act as a mental focus.

Dragons, phoenixes, unicorns, are sympathetic characters in Wizarding and Muggle mythology; they are warm or strong or reliable or noble in our minds and hearts. An eleven-year-old child finds their wand and magic more accessible, with a connection to their wands.

Using bodily parts of less glamorous magical beings would be less believable, less buyable. There were, of course, worldwide theories concerning the most efficient and durable core components, but as Ollivander's carefully spindled handwriting in the margins explained, it is the Wizard's subconscious that chooses the wand.

He left when I arrived, waving amicably and moving slowly towards Fortescue's around the corner. I shrugged, and sat down amongst the dust to look over the wands laid out, box-less, on the bench. Though I hadn't spent much time reading about the various woods and techniques used in the construction of the body, I recognised these easily. Vine wood and dragon heartstring, the same as the wand in my pocket. All the same length and weight, but different shapes and shades of stain.

Taking the hint, I picked each up in turn, closing my eyes to feel and compare. I assumed that the lesson was the title of the fourth chapter in my book – _Process makes Perfect_. The mood or atmosphere, the magical surroundings, the dragon or tree, could create an entirely different result. A different lathe, or different age of wood... it was almost immeasurable, the potential variations.

I watched the passers-by through the gloomy window for a while, amused. Given how different our bloodlines and home situations were, so many Wizards and Muggles fell into the same patterns of existence. Almost the inverse of wands, really. No matter how variable the ingredients, most humans ended up the same.

I could feel my mind and awareness expanding out from rote lists and facts into a deeper comprehension and _knowing_. I felt awake and alive in a very strange way.

Unlike anything I'd learnt before, I couldn't assimilate this through books. I would have to learn a lot, of course, but more than that I would have to do and be. I felt as if nothing I had ever learnt could possibly be as important as this.

Then the shop bell rang, and someone from Hufflepuff, a few years behind me, came inside. They seemed visibly shocked to see me.

"Hello, er, is Mr. Ollivander around?"

I cleared my throat, and squared my shoulders against the unexpected situation. I would have to bluff my way around this.

"No. He's taking a break, but I can help you. Did you need a new wand, or a repair?"

"Ah, a new one. Mine's... it... well, you know. Anyway, I heard that this place had finally re-opened, so I came in."

I smiled, and nodded, and tried to look as if I knew what I was doing. I walked slowly down a row of towering, jumbled boxes and wrestled four down into my arms. Blue faded card, dark polished wood, felted, ribboned, they were mismatched through age and inattentiveness.

I tidied the wands on the counter into their boxes, and luckily noticed some small runes on the end of the lid. I could do this. With a cursory glance at the blue card box, I lifted the lid gently and proffered the wand inside.

"Hawthorn, Unicorn's hair, 12 inches."

He blinked, picked it up, and gazed at it dubiously.

"Hmmm." He said. I worried at my lip for a second, then spoke again. I had to maintain some appearance of capability and knowledge, or he'd lose faith in the Ollivander brand, and I might risk my position.

"Well," I tried, "if it feels wrong, it's wrong. I'm sure it took you some time to find a comfortable, workable wand last time."

He looked a little unsure, so I took the wand from him and pushed it in its box to the side of the counter, pulling the wooden box forwards.

"It's the wand that chooses the wizard, after all," I smiled.

He nodded, and then smiled for the first time. "That's right. What's this one, then?"

I sneaked a look at the box, and rattled it off quickly and confidently, hoping that I'd guessed this one correctly.

"10 and a half inches, Ivy, Unicorn hair again."

Because of the steep learning curve, and trying to memorise every reaction, the half-successes and not-quites, the half hour it took to find Kevin Whitby's wand flew by. I hadn't noticed that Ollivander had returned, even, until he stepped up behind me and smiled approvingly.

"Whitby. Nice to see you. Hazel again, I see. But a Unicorn hair, that's quite a change. I suppose that you really were due for a replacement, in that case."

Whitby smiled, and nodded his head shyly.

"Yeah, well, the Unicorn ones were feeling better, so we thought to head in that direction," He laughed, placing his galleons on the counter.

After he had left, Ollivander patted my shoulder and told me that it was time for my new wand.

"Should I get some boxes down, then?"

He shook his head, wisps of pale white hair floating about amongst the dust mites in the air. It lent a dreamlike, surreal tint to his words.

"I wanted you to look through the wands to get a feel for the shop, the weight of the place. Since you've done that already, we can get started on your practice."

I goggled, as I realised what he was implying.

"I'm going to make my wand?"

He chuckled, and led me towards the back room, a warm hand conciliatory upon my back.

"Of course not. No wizard can make their own wand; It's like trying to tailor a suit, from scratch, without a mirror. Only a very accomplished wandmaker can step back from him – or her – self and create something worth using."

We sat down at a workbench littered with scraps and tools.

"And you can, I suppose," I teased, smiling at him. I honestly did wonder, now, whether he used a wand that he'd made himself, or one he'd ordered from somebody else. Perhaps he had found an antique wand, because reused wands weren't unheard of, or had had one made by the Ollivander before him.

He shrugged, unreadable with a soft smile, and set a box containing core materials before me.

"In any case, you'll practice making wands for people you know. Use your knowledge of their personalities to try and create a wand that has its' own identity and power. You'll get used to thinking about receptivity, conductivity, and flexibility. Compatibility and identity and magic."

He chose a dragon heartstring from the box, and held it before me with pinched fingers. It was drier and stringier than I had expected. I had obviously assumed that my wand contained a warm, moist, living core. I felt a little foolish, all things considered.

"While," he placed the heartstring on a flock covered tray and covered it with a handkerchief before handing me a tray and nodding, "I will work alongside you, making your new wand, so you can see how it is done. We'll take breaks if we get any more customers this week."

"This _week?!" _I couldn't help blurting out.

"Of course. Save for the start of the school year, there's very little demand for new wands. Most wizards and witches usually owl in, make an appointment, to save themselves time. Anyway!" He waved his wrinkled hands emphatically towards the box of cores, "I'm interrupting myself now. Think of someone, anyone you like, and try to choose a core that works for or resembles them."

I frowned down into the boxes, and knew it would be Snape. Which was highly inappropriate, as I was only just getting to know the man. But, as I thought through the alternatives, it couldn't be Harry, he was too... Harry. Ginny was too sweet and simple and in love for me to tolerate the thought of spending hours thinking about her personality. Ron was, well, exactly. I truly didn't know anybody at the moment, for all the years I had spent with everyone.

So, of course, it had to be Snape. I looked at the collection of core samples, seemingly so small and cheap and humble in a jumbled, tiny box. Smiling with what was either a wicked sense of humour or the silliness of my very tired mind, I gently picked out a strand of shining white Unicorn hair, and placed it on my own tray.

Ollivander nodded thoughtfully, and then clapped his hands.

"I'm loosing my senses, in my old age, aren't I?"

I blinked at him, frowning.

"We can't have you choosing the wood or designing the form until you've become very closely acquainted with The Lathe, young lady."

The emphasis he placed upon those words seemed ominous, and my fingers twitched as if in anticipation. Sure enough, Ollivander led me by the shoulders to a very old-style lathe, propelled not by magic, or Muggle electricity, but by a very flimsy looking wooden foot pedal. I scrutinised it for a while.

"Bob!" Ollivander called out, and a very upright and not at all brownish house elf apparated without warning. I felt my usual indignance for the oppressed displaced by shock.

"He's called _Bob?!_"

"It's a highly respectable name, young missy!" Bob cried out, scandalised, from beneath the table. He was already settling himself onto a spare chock of wood, and testing his feet against the pedal.

"I mean, rather," I amended, "I've only met house elves with insipid fairy names."

Bob sniffed his nose, and nodded at me rather oddly. I realised that many taller people, like Lucius Malfoy, used that nod. It was a little strange to see it from a different perspective, where it was not debonaire or striking at all, but still reflected a stiff and unmoving dignity. I had never seen anyone like him, and as Ollivander thrust a carving tool into my hand and left me with a rough scrap of wood and Bob, I told him so.

He smiled briefly and set off on the pedal, saying that he ".. at least, can make myself appropriate coverings from discarded handkerchiefs and tablecloths. That Malfoy bunch, the whole clan," - and here I realised he meant Dobby's family, rather than the Malfoys themselves, "not one of them can sew or add or spell to save their own hides. Disgraceful. I blame the inbreeding."

We settled into a comfortable silence, and I made a mental note to talk to more house-elves, in a calm rather than revolutionary tone. There seemed to be so much more I could learn, so much more I was exposed to every day, that I felt a greater thirst and hunger to just be alive and moving than I had ever felt before.

The afternoon passed in an instant, and took forever. Ollivander sent me out the front door later than the day before, with plasters wrapped around my fingers and a bruise on my foot from where I had accidentally slipped it between Bob's pedal and the floor. I was tired, and lost in the whirring clumsiness I seemed to display, but glowing from it all.

Everything was so haphazard, so chaotic, so wonderful. I laughed into the dark of Diagon Alley, and almost tripped into Snape.

"Good evening, Miss Granger?"

I smiled at him, and linked my arm into his, walking us briskly towards The Leaky.

"It's just... everything, really. Books, and without books, and all at once, but not at all, and so chaotic. If I'd met this in a course at Hogwarts, I'd have walked. In fact, I did walk from Trelawny."

I heard him snort, but kept babbling.

"The point is that I think I've moved beyond rules and facts and numbness, and am only, just now, realising that I can live and learn at once! Osmosis, that beautiful process! So natural and.. ouch."

I had pressed a sore finger into the stone that opened the archway, and paused to wince.

"And," I felt breathless and could feel my heartbeat pulsing with the cold night through my arms, legs, and face, "and you really can't write letters, can you?"

Snape blanched, and ushered me into the dark warm light of the pub, muttering that it was my turn to buy drinks, since I had surely received my pay by now.

I didn't complain, but I did make sure I took a very obvious and long sip out of his glass before I set it before him. He raised an eyebrow, and pulled it towards himself.

"I mean, not that you can't write, but rather that you couldn't seem to decide whether you wanted to be formal and staid and proper, or just babble like I am now, about everything."

He blinked into his juice, and I bit my tongue. Was I ballsing it up again? I felt fuelled by a new and frantic energy, that pushed words out of me before I could stop them. He eventually answered, his voice duller and quieter, as if he was trying to be unheard.

"If you'd like, I can restrict myself to one or the other."

"Pardon?"

"I mean, I could only ever write to you with basic formal language, or I could, figuratively, put all of myself on the page. To make it less confusing."

He seemed flustered as he spoke, and when he had finished, he nonchalantly took a deep drink of his juice.

"I want all of you."

He choked on his juice, and sprayed some through his nose onto my cloak. We spent a few minutes grasping at napkins and patting things down, before he frowned at me. I couldn't help a grin from rising to my face again. He jostled me with his shoulder, and took my glass away from me.

"You deserved to get sprayed in juice, young woman. That comment was far too innocent-sounding to be anything but deliberate. And your timing, well..."

He raised his hands, shrugged, and then leant in surprisingly close to me, whispering in my ear.

"I'll Obliviate you and tell Weasley where you work, if you mention the content of those letters in public."

I grimaced, and he settled back into his seat. We were quiet for a while, a little awkward. Snape hid behind his hair, leaning down over the large table we sat at.

"I," I began, then I winced, and began to hate the personal pronoun. I felt to self-centric, so insulated, that I wanted to elide it from my vocabulary, and think and speak in an existentialist haaze for the rest of my life.

"Even awkward and silent and clumsy like this," I tried again, "even tired and silent and threatened, I've never felt warmer or more comfortable in my whole life."

He looked up, sideways at me, his hair flopping a little over his large and bumpy nose.

"It feels incredibly weird saying this, but you're the best friend I've ever had, I think. You want it gone, it's gone. No need to joke about Ron, even."

He scoffed, and sat back up, with his little half-smile.

"What makes you think I was joking?"

I laughed, and turned to look at the bar. "Should we order dinner here? I don't fancy what's left in my cousin's fridge today."

He shrugged, reminding me far more of Harry and Ron in Fifth year than of the potions master that had ignored my attempts at learning beyond the classroom. So we ordered fish and chips and actual drinks, and spent a good half hour one-upping each other with theories on the origins of the meal.

"It's from the squid in Hogwarts, you know," He poked at his dinner, "It keeps regenerating, so they're using it as a cheap replacement for real food. All the Mediterranean trade routes dried up during oldie moldie's attacks."

"That does explain the rubbery texture," I conceded, "but I know that Muggles in the UK still fish. I have to educate you, Snape, on the effects of Nuclear waste disposal on rivers, and genetic mutations in the food chain."

He nodded, sagely. "Maybe so, _Hermione_. But I'm not so desperate for company that I eat said mutated fish for dinner with a 'best friend' whom I only refer to by his surname."

"Alright, then _Severus_. How've you been today, anyway? Any luck with money or work?"

I'd meant to sound interested and hopeful, but his face fell just slightly enough that I knew he'd had bog all luck, and less hope.

"As much as these evenings are better than staying in my cold, rotting, shithole alone, I won't be able to afford the high cuisine that is... this..." He lifted a vinegar sodden, cold chip with his fork and let it fall limpy onto his plate.

"It really defies any words in the human language, doesn't it?"

I contemplated the chip, lonely on its plate. Snape lonely in his house, and me sitting in my cousin's flat listening to teenagers slam doors above and below.

"So you want to stop doing this because of money problems?" I asked, feeling a little bruised and raw inside. I hadn't realised how much I'd valued these two nights until then.

He rolled his eyes, and held my hands. I realised I'd been fidgeting, spinning the ring around, again.

"I meant, you dolt, that you should chivalrously offer to shout me. I was your long-suffering professor, after all, and now close intimate friend."

I laughed, and pulled my hands away too quickly for my own liking, and nodded.

"Yes, with one stipulation. That's a lot of money, dinner out five days a week, if not seven. I'm only on an apprentice's wage, and no matter how short my official hours, that place seems to absorb time like a sponge. You can make me sandwiches for lunch, to compensate. Drop them off about twelve. Make enough for the three, no, four, of us."

He sat back, taken aback, and rubbed his forehead in apparent consternation.

"Four?" He asked.

"Bob, the house elf," I explained. He laughed, presumably at the memory of S.P.E.W., and stretched his arm across towards me. We shook on it, and parted ways with promises of better chips, perhaps a search for a different pub, and some tea with those sandwiches, if you please.

I apparated close enough to the flats to walk for a moment, and made my way inside. Iphigenia was sitting at the small kitchen table with a textbook, and she raised her head to wave a greeting as I moved my sore foot over to my nest of bedding. She giggled, and I looked at her in astonishment. She hardly ever giggled.

"What?" I demanded.

"You're _blushing_." She exclaimed. "You never blush, Herm. What's going on, got a man to go with that ring, now?"

I raised a hand to swat at her ineffectually, and changed into my pyjamas, ignoring her for a few minutes.

"I told you about the ring already," I sighed at her eventually, "A friend of mine gave it to me, because he hated it, and I didn't, and it was a family thing, so he couldn't just sell it."

She gave me a very knowing, silly smile, so I pulled the duvet over my head and threw my smelly worn socks in more or less the direction of her face.

"Rent's in an envelope in my handbag. Help yourself, and let me sleep." I grumbled, before closing my eyes to the world.


	5. Chapter 4

_Author's Note: I'll be out of town and net access from next week onwards for a conference. Since I'm busy with prep, Chapter 5 is going to wait a week or two, so that I can edit and polish it properly. Next week, instead, I'll be transferring across my other fics, which are also accessible through my LJ account, linked in my profile. They aren't, sadly, HP fics. About the short length of this one, I'm sorry. Chapter 5 should be back to a respectable length :)_

_Edit: Small britpicked fixes made. Thanks very much to whitehound for the comments!  
_

Chapter 4

I never did get around to reading Ron's letters. Instead, I fell into a tiring but comfortable pattern for a few weeks. Breakfast, apparition to work, Snape's slowly improving sandwiches for lunch, more woodwork practice and first-aid, dinner at the pub, home. On Saturdays, for about a month, I met with Harry and Ron for ice-cream. Ron seemed alright, even. Not angry or fuming or desperate or heartbroken, but almost normal. I felt a little upset at first, because surely there should be some heartache, something left from the feelings that had made him feel so betrayed.

I didn't like to think that he had that temper usually. Yes, he had always been a little stubborn and argumentative, but he'd been my friend for _years_. I didn't want to allow the thought that Ron could be that bitter, that petty, into my head. It lent a sour aftertaste to the ice-cream, and left me a little off-centre as we caught up that first time.

But, then, the bubble burst, and I was reassured, if that is the best language for it, of the strength of Ron's emotions for me. He hemmed and hawwed, fiddled with his dirty spoon on the table, and then looked sternly into my eyes for a few quiet moments.

"Ron?" I asked, and Harry excused himself to the bathroom apologetically. I tried not to wince, able to anticipate what was coming.

He rubbed his neck, and fiddled for a few more seconds before speaking.

"I'm sorry," He looked around, and paused, "I mean, I was obviously taking it too fast for you, and I want you to know, Hermione,"

He leaned across the table and reached for my hands. I pulled them back, clenched into fists so tight that my fingernails bit into my palms, head shaking silently.

"I..." he seemed a little thwarted by my physical withdrawl, but he pushed onwards. "I'll wait for you, for as long as you need."

I wanted to punch him, throw his conciliatory tone and oblivious stupid misconceptions through Fortescue's glass window. I took a deep breath, and tried to control my frustration. Ron was my friend, Harry was my friend, and we could get past this.

"I don't need it Ron," I eventually managed, "I'm never going to think of you in that way."

He sputtered, and nodded. Shook his head. Scratched at a freckle on his arm. Smiled guilelessly and warmly at me.

"Hermione, you can't pretend that we weren't making love all summer."

Deep breaths, I reminded myself. This was an awful place to have this conversation, and I'm sure that Ron mistook my leaning forwards as some sort of acceptance. His rude shock when I spoke showed clearly in his eyes.

"We didn't make love, Ron. We fucked. I was numb, and empty, and traumatised, and we fucked. I'm sorry that you thought it was anything else, and I'm sorry that I used you like that – I never would have if I'd known how you felt – but... I..."

He looked very worried, so I gave him a minute.

"I'd just like to go back to being friends, all of us. I'm a little glad, that you slipped me that ring. That the spell on it went off, that it pushed us apart. Who knows how long we'd have been in that horrible situation, otherwise?"

He grimaced, then pursed his lips very tightly. As if summoned by a secret signal, Harry traipsed back happily from the bathroom. My angry glare at him was lost, as his attention was focused mainly on Ron.

We carried on alright, if a bit strained. Later in the afternoon, I brought the subject up with Harry, who reassured me that everything would be alright. Ron would understand, was already beginning to understand. That next week would be better, different.

It wasn't. Again ice-cream, again Harry Potter and the Sudden Urge to Urinate for Great Lengths of Time. Again Ron reached for my hand, smiling.

"You're still wearing the ring, love."

I shook him off, and showed him pointedly the name engraved inside.

"Snape hated it, so he told me to keep it. It's become a symbol for me, of my freedom from that whole mess." _and you_, I was tempted to spit out. But, instead, I spent another half hour calmly trying to talk Ron through it all. Harry spent another half hour later in the day reassuring me that, yes, indeed, things would be different next week.

When I sat down at lunch, the fourth Monday after the fourth Saturday of ice-cream, I tore my first sandwich half into shreds, throwing the scraps of bread and cheese mercilessly up at Owls coming to and from the postal office.

"You know, you'll never hit them with a throwing arm like yours," Snape jibed. I ignored him, and ate the other half, wishing I hadn't wasted so much Branston pickle on the dumb birds and kicking my heels against the steps of Ollivander's.

He grunted, accepting my petulance, and ignored me in favour of his food for a while.

"It's Weasley, isn't it? I told you when you first mentioned it, that I thought those outings were a stupid idea."

"Harry, actually."

He nodded, and then spat the word out in the same way he had during school. "Potter."

It felt good, to hear it said with so much spite. I nudged Snape with my elbow. "Ooh-er. Say that again."

He raised an eyebrow at me, and I scowled at him.

"Old bat. You're no fun at all."

Perhaps being a teacher for all those years had given him an uncanny sense for words left unspoken. After a few minutes of silence and lunch, I explained it all, feeling as if I was admitting to sneaking out after curfew or something else nominal and silly.

"Ginny invited me to The Burrow on Sunday. She said Harry and Ron were doing something with George, so I didn't risk running into them."

I took a deep breath, more to control my fury than anything else.

"She told me that Harry had confided in her; that he thought I was upset about the cursed ring, not the fucking proposal or anything. That he's been encouraging Ron, of all things! After listening to me, and agreeing that things were unhealthy as they were, and sympathising with me, and promising he'd help sort things out, and he was really just..."

I stop talking, for fear of shrieking like a banshee on the steps of my workplace. Snape salvaged the day by squinting out at the street and swearing.

"_Fucking_ Potter. Arsehole, thoughtless, feckless cunt!"

I smiled.

"Both of them, I mean," He appended.

We tidied up our crumbs, and headed back into the shop. Snape had taken to hanging around for a little afterwards. Just me, Snape, and Ollivander in the shop usually, with the occasional customer. Snape moved to the back room sink, to refill the kettle and boil it with a careful hex. Ollivander maintained that as long as Bob was kept busy pedalling, tidying wood scraps and dusting the boxes, Snape could make himself useful.

I'd made verbal my doubts that Bob ever did any dusting, but that _that_ was no business of mine, apparently. The chronometer in the corner ticked softly, and dust floated in the early afternoon light.

"You really should do something." I suggested to Snape, "Like apply to the Ministry for financial assistance, or do some mail-order brewing, or if you've a spare room, you could get a tenant."

Snape's back stiffened, and he scoffed at me.

"If the pricks at the Ministry wanted to help me, they'd unfreeze my bloody Teacher's pension. I've taught their sproggs for long enough that I've legally earnt it!"

Ah, it was going to be one of those days. I carefully tiptoed around Snape and sat back down at the desk, pretending to sort through some invoices.

"And," He grumbled, decanting the boiling water into a teapot, "I don't think there's a market, with the community this small, for mail-order potions. Aside from the basic fact that Owls usually drop their packages from great heights, or..."

I nodded as solemnly as I could, and tried not to laugh as Ollivander shuffled into the front of the store, muttering about needing to dust. I realised, as Snape ranted and I did my best to ignore him, that this was almost reminiscent of fifth year. Before things went strange, and all tent-shaped. Just me, Ron, Harry, sitting around tables. Daydreaming and pretending I couldn't hear them bitching about Snape's last class.

I bit my tongue inside my mouth, and hoped that the pain would provide enough of a distraction to keep the tears from leaking out. I didn't even miss Hogwarts, as such, or all those books in the library, as much as I missed how simple and straightforward things had seemed then. How obvious and positive the future had looked.

I drew my mind back to Snape's voice, which had softened somewhat.

"...and anyway, I doubt that a community that won't feed or employ me would have any constituents willing to pay to breathe the same air as me."

He fell silent, and I clenched my fingernails into my palms. I was sick of this mood, already. Tired of these mood swings and the desperate ache inside my chest. I was employed, happy, safe. I was over with Ron, and had my memories back, and was goddamn fucking _fine!_

I was fixed. All better. I didn't want to spiral back into those feelings of helplessness. I hated the feeling of impotence, the thought of being one of those shivering, sniffling, crying girls that wrote life-experience stories for Witch Weekly magazine about their losses in the war. It was over, I was past it. Determined to be past it all, and wake up one day feeling calm, composed, and in control. I swallowed heavily against the thought that, perhaps, I would never wake up alright again.

Snape took a deep, rushed breath, and forced out the words "But thank you for trying to help, anyway. I value your, er, commiserative qualities almost as much as I do your friendship in, er, general."

He patted my free hand with his own uncomfortably, and shifted. I blinked until my eyes felt less damp, and forced a smile. Looked up, saw his awkward and half-constipated face, and couldn't help but laugh.

"Fuck me, I'm bipolar today," I smiled apologetically. He scratched the left side of his head.

"You're much coarser than I thought you were, before," He ventured. I felt stronger and warmer inside, just hearing it. Coarse, rough. Tougher than he thought.

"Shit, sorry." I wasn't really, but said so anyway. Basic manners, I suppose, like saying "yes, please" when somebody offered up a pot of Earl Grey, even if it did taste like dishwater.

He shook his head, and then peered a little shyly out from under his hair.

"Don't be. I like it..."

He coughed, then, red-faced, and turned away from me. He muttered about de-gnoming the vegetable patch, and same time tonight, mumble.

I stared at the door for some time, just a little shocked. He'd disappeared before I'd been able to process what had happened. I could half-feel emotions clarifying in my heart, but my mind was numbed and derailed by the thought. It repeated itself, bold words, like a mantra for the entire afternoon.

_Snape blushes._

Ollivander gave me a very concerned but knowing look. He closed the books on my fingers,and pushed me bodily towards the shopfront.

"No meddling with dangerous substances like wand-cores today, missie." He answered my questioning look with a stern one of his own, and nodded towards the piles of empty boxes clattered beside the bench.

"You can keep yourself busy sorting those."

I was listless and absent, as I repaired and paired lids with boxes, stuffed felt lining back in, threw out damaged ribbons and other silly archaic padding from the older packaging. It was as if my entire self was so focused upon moving, shifting and changing, that my conscious self was left idle. I spent the time trying not to think about Snape's strange behaviour, or wonder why it was bothering me so much.

When I realised it was dark outside, and I could see his sillhouette framed in warm streetlight against the front window, I felt my face grow uncomfortably warm. Rugging up, to create a warm excuse for a pink face, I rushed out the door to an unmistakable soft laugh from Ollivander. I felt a childish surge of petulance, and then walked briskly and silently beside Snape to the pub.

When we sat down, I felt out-of-place and gawky. I wished to whatever high heavens were left in the world, if there were any at all, that I hurried myself up and realised whatever it was that I was feeling. Not knowing, being unable to put it into words, was frustrating and displacing.

"I feel like a crapulent, broken record. Reeking of discontent and saying the same things, over and over again." He held his hands together, set them apart on the table, and gathered them up again. Sighed, as if he wished he could retract what he'd said.

I winced in sympathy, and smiled as our dinners were set down before us. Greasy and chipful and comforting.

"You're not that bad. You just need to stop sulking, read some enjoyable light fiction, get out into the sunshining happy brilliant world." I bit viciously into a chip. "Or some shit like that."

He grunted, and smiled a little into his glass.

"Or, like me, you could find a dark corner to lurk in, with a miserable bastard."

He snorted, but was silent. Nothing much was different from the night before, or any of the nights before, really, but something felt irreversibly changed between us. I sighed heavily myself, when I was half-finished, and decided to launch into my own tirade.

"Well," I complained, "at least you have a bedroom. I can't stay in my parents' house, not now at least, and all I own in the world currently are my old schoolbooks and a duvet. In fact, you probably have a bloody bookshelf! A fireplace to burn your unwanted mail in!"

He smiled at me. Openly, guilelessly. It hooked into that weirdness inside me, and I hurriedly turned back to my meal. Ate quickly, and almost choked chasing the hot potato chips down with my drink.

"If it's a real problem," He suggested, as I stood to leave, "_you_ could always rent the spare room."

I stared at him. It was all too much, really. A long, confusing, awkward, awful, gut-twisting day.

"You have an income, after all. I could cook, and you could nag me to stop skulking in the laundry as if it were a dungeon."

It was a terrible idea. I was still trying to shake off Ron. Though I had intellectually moved beyond the war and everything, I was still obviously emotionally hungover. Snape apparently blushed, and smiled, and I was still catching up to myself. There were endless reasons that could justify why this was an impossibly awful idea.

"Alright, then," I heard somebody say. Snape nodded, surprised, and set his cutlery down on the table. He took my hand and led me, still somewhat dazed, over to the fireplace. He took a handful of powder, and waited patiently for me to follow suit before he leant down to whisper his address into my ear.

"What?"

He repeated it. His hair itched on my neck, which was somehow worse than if it had brushed or tickled or touched. It itched like a disease.

"No, I mean, what?"

"Come have a look at the place. See if you want to, after all. Negotiate a price, all that."

I said "Oh. Right. Sure," still sounding like someone else, flat and otherly. I threw the powder into the fire, and said "Spinner's End." resolutely.

I stumbled a little, righted myself, and moved out of the way. Snape arrived quite soon after I did, and he fumbled around with lighting spells. He put a kettle on, and walked me through the place. Downstairs was about the size of Iphigenia's flat's main room, but lined with bookshelves instead of benches and windows. His fireplace looked awkward in the room, too old and large and grand to be surrounded by the old and ratty furniture, the mess of books and papers that were squeezed and double-stacked into shelves that looked like they'd been nailed together from scrap wood. They quite possibly had been.

There was a front door beside a threadbare couch. A back door beside a high, small, blackened window. I opened the door curiously, to discover a two-foot wide strip of old stained concrete, a dark mess of overgrown grass, and air that reeked of refuse and decay. There was a visible lack of any vegetable patches.

"The pond," He shrugged, so casually that I knew he must be embarrassed. He cleared his throat, and showed me a concealed stairway. It led upstairs to a narrow landing with three doors. One led to a bathroom, and another to a sparsely furnished room with a few cardboard boxes in a corner. Snape waved his wand and banished them.

"You didn't have to do that. I mean, I have hardly anything, myself."

"They were my father's." He shrugged, and led me back downstairs. Just as I was realising that I had heard him put a kettle on, but hadn't seen a kitchen, we reached the bottom of the stairs and I followed him in a strange twist that had us entering a small, thin, shadowy bare kitchen. The lino was scuffed, scratched and dirty. One of the drawers was using an old button and a rubber band as a knob, and one cupboard was missing its doors entirely.

If I had come here from Hogwarts, with only memories of my parents' house and the castle itself, seeing this place would have broken my heart. Instead, it seemed wonderful. Dark, like most of the Wizarding world. Confusing, comfortably so. Of course, it did need work. But Snape had time, and my rent would buy us enough raw materials.

I felt the uncertain listless emptiness of the afternoon soak away into a flood of bloody minded optimism. I knew where I stood, with hopeless battles. With dodgy tents and abandoned shacks and desperation. Cursed hallways. Twisting paths. Missing knobs.

I accepted my tea, and waited for Snape to fetch his own and some biscuits. We settled down into old leather chairs in the sitting room that let up clouds of must and crackled under our thighs like dry mud.

"Obviously you don't want to stay here," He admitted glumly, letting his eyes weigh heavily on the wallpaper that had peeled to rest in curlicues of dust and cobwebs along the top of his bookshelves. "I'd forgotten myself, how awful it looked, until I saw you in it. Seeing a person here other than myself, that is, it throws this place into a harsh relief."

I blinked at him, crossed my legs, and raised my nose.

"Don't be stupid, Severus. There's a bed, which is more than I've had for a month or so. There's you, a grown accomplished wizard, who will renovate this house with my rent money. If you managed to produce the lunches you have in the kitchen that's behind us, then I've no doubt that you'll do wonders with the carpet."

He gave me a very baleful and disbelieving look, so I planted my feet firmly on the floor and stood to look sternly at his bookshelf.

"You're not getting more than twenty-five galleons a week, but I'll pay the deposit up-front. I should be able to afford that."

We finished our tea, and I waved a goodbye, told him I would bring my things over on the weekend, and apparated home.

When I had sat down amongst my bedding, dressed for bed and brushed my teeth, I lay awake in the dark. I could feel tension I hadn't known I was carrying seep away from my body. As if I was grounded by cushions, it flowed from me. I could almost feel it sinking through the honeycomb of walls and floors and doors beneath me, down through the asphalt and dirt and pipes.

I knew I had made a very definite and awful mistake. Living with Snape would be awful, for all it would be affordable and comfortable and blissfully reclusive. I knew I could survive his habits, because of our time in Grimmauld Place.

I wished that I'd never agreed to move in to Grimmauld, but I hadn't really had any options at the time. I wished that it had never fractured and fell apart. I missed breakfasts with everyone, and that half-calm sense of belonging.

Which was part of the mistake. I wasn't going to recover that old sense of comfort and false stability at Spinner's End. It was going to be a cramped, depressed, confusing experience. Living in the dredges of Snape's childhood was presumably a bad idea, irrespective of my own emotional baggage. It hadn't been all that difficult to notice that he had given me the larger bedroom. The master bedroom. Presumably, he was still sleeping in his old bedroom. Lying down with all of his past, every night.

My breath hitched at the thought of living like that. I couldn't contemplate living in my parents' leftovers and remnants, and I _hadn't_ had a traumatic childhood. No wonder he'd always been a reserved, tetchy, grumpy person. Who wouldn't be, in a situation like that?

I sighed, tired and exasperated with myself. I wasn't thinking, wasn't trying to catch hold of that unnerving afternoon. As if I was shying away myself from the thought that I might just like Snape. Want to...

I swore under my breath, and let myself daydream about forming interestingly shaped wand handles. I focused on form and shape, on curling wallpaper and dusty boxes and cheap sandwiches. I most certainly did not think about Snape as I fell asleep.


	6. Chapter 5

_Author's Note: Disclaimer can be found at the start of the fic. Sorry for the delay; it took longer to get the draft done than I'd expected, and I wanted to get some space before final check and posting. There are still parts I'm not happy with, but on the whole, it's postable. I've drafted the final chapters and epilogue now, and once they've gone through editing and checking, they should be up. Depending on betas, and my own editing efforts, we're looking at one week to a month until it's all done._

_I am very grateful to my two beta readers for this chapter; Mad Madam Me, and Maiden of Books._

Chapter 5

Maybe it was the sandwiches, or the shared familiar happy scoffing at the shoppers in Diagon Alley over tea, but I found myself a little taken aback when after two days I realised that Snape was, in fact, a sullen and withdrawn bastard. Not that I liked him any less for it, but it was frustrating to try and ask for an opinion on what to cook for dinner. It was painful to the point of drawing figurative blood trying to get him to agree to use some of my pay to fix the broken drawers in the kitchen. Stumbling every now and then around the odd corners and spells that concealed most of the rooms, and the assorted bruises that gave me, didn't help my mood in the slightest.

We were both stubborn and testy and not at all willing to compromise. If it hadn't been making me want to scream and tear out _his_ hair, it would have been a beautiful and touching experience. Two arseholes finally finding their true place in this life. Grumbling, scorning, and reading in harmony. He'd taken, by the end of the first week, to hiding in his bedroom whenever I was home. I'm not sure when he ate. I always made enough dinner for two, and left everything for him to clean up. He stopped lingering over lunch, and eventually started leaving sandwiches in paper bags near the fireplace. On the Friday morning, I found a pubic hair in the shower soap and fumed my way into Ollivander's, smashing my lunch down onto the bench near the sink and screaming "Bah!" at the mess that I would have to swallow come my lunch break.

"Sounds like you need to relieve your tension." A voice lilted at me, from behind. I whirled around, ready for blood. Someone was in my shop. A female, _lilting_ someone, and I had just about had enough of the day already. I rounded to the table and saw Ollivander, with Luna Lovegood, having a cup of tea. I had to clench my fingers into my palm. I respected the old man far too much, and I knew just how much he'd been through with Luna, at the hands of the Death Eaters.

"I'm going to castrate Snape, and feed his testicles to Fluffy." I stated, in as calm a voice as I could manage. Then, I poured myself some tea and put a biscuit in my mouth so that I wouldn't say anything else stupid or vindictive. Luna had been overseas tracking some beast or another, and Ollivander had missed her quite a bit more than he let on. I wasn't about to let myself ruin their reunion. I fumed, while they shared a very strange glance and a secret laugh, then chatted quietly about local folklore of the South Americas and the discovery of a real, live, some-nonsense-animal.

I very deliberately didn't think about the towel incident as I sipped my cooling tea. Because it wasn't really an incident, at all. I'd just happened to be coming up the stairs, and Snape, whose bedroom door was right near the top of the stairwell, had just happened to be wet from a shower and wrapped in a towel. Which had, when he heard me and turned, dropped.

And, alright, that had been an uncomfortable moment of realisation. He wasn't aesthetically attractive. Not handsome, or fit, or young. Tall, but not lanky. Not slim, or paunchy, just Snapish. But, as I saw his anatomy from a very strange angle, I had the thought that it was nice to finally see him naked.

I'd turned around, mumbled some apologies, and he had mumbled his own. When I'd heard his bedroom door shut, I'd made my way shakily up the hall to my own. I stared at the wall blankly, and tried to digest my own thoughts and reactions through my brain. I had thought it was nice to have _finally_ seen his naked body. Balls, cock, all of it. Wonderful. Brilliant.

How long had I felt like this? It felt like a logical, simple, comfortable thought. I was certainly more than a little aroused, just from the sight of him. I wasn't sure, in that moment, what was worse. Was it that I had an apparent crush on my housemate, that he was naked and damp in the room beside mine, or that I'd basically proposed marriage to him earlier – oh shit, had it started then? Had I been angling for sex this whole time, unconsciously? I'd very deliberately avoided the concept of any real relationship. Just blowing Ron off, over and over again, was more than enough for me at the moment.

"He figured it out before I did," I stated dumbly, in the back room of Ollivander's. _That _was why he'd been so distant that last week. Ollivander and Luna stopped their quiet chat to glance at me curiously. Luna smirked, and nodded her head fondly.

"You'll never be anyone but yourself, will you," she smiled at me, "hating anyone else getting ahead of you, as if you're racing against time and space to understand the world."

She grinned, and sipped her tea. I stared at her, a little dumbfounded. Was that a criticism? We never had got on that well during school, after all...

She set her cup down, and nodded resolutely. "Promise me that you'll never change. You're brilliant."

Ah. There we go. Luna turned back to Ollivander, and they started talking about Yule and the potential plans for a memorial dinner. The short distraction didn't take the edge of my chilling realisation. Snape had figured out my silly crush well before I had, obviously, and so he'd been backing off. Probably hoping that I'd cool down and return to being a sane and sarcastic companion, instead of a twitchy and blushing, simpering idiot.

I rubbed at the ring on my hand, and decided that I wasn't being useful at all. I wasn't studying, I wasn't socialising, or serving any customers. So I excused myself for a while, and walked straight out of the store and along Diagon Alley into Flourish and Blott's. There is nothing like a new and exciting book, just waiting expectantly to be read, a promise for the end of the day, to chase away negative thoughts and worries. I hadn't bought any books in quite some time, to be honest, and as I thought of it, the need to have something new and interesting began to bring my mood back up slightly.

I swung the door open, focused entirely on my price limit, and the sections of choice – arithmancy, charms, woodworking, and the not-quite-a-section-in-itself shelf that would contain any books on theories of the interaction between magic and physical objects. Books just different enough from work that they'd be enjoyable on my days off, but close enough that the theories would help me build on my contextual knowledge. Or, I would have, if I hadn't noticed someone very familiar standing before the arithmancy shelves.

It was, of course, Snape. He was scanning the pages of a book, his back to me. I bit my tongue, and decided that my day had been officially declared a failure. I stole myself for the next moment that he turned a page, so that I could at least attempt a silent escape. He didn't seem to have noticed me, and so I clasped my purse to my side, to stifle any jingles or noises it might make when I fled.

"What do you think of this?" He asked casually. His voice wasn't the cold and clipped one that I had become used to in the last few days, but easier and open. "Krimp has some interesting concepts on Muggle space-time mathematics and the movement of spells through those dimensions, but he doesn't have anywhere near enough references..."

When I didn't answer, Snape turned and handed me the book. I gazed blankly at it, then back up at his face. He didn't seem happy, but he certainly didn't carry the atmosphere of absolute doom that he had the last time I had offered him tea, and been rebuffed. Perhaps he was just becoming used to the idea of my crush, less irritated? Fuck. Guessing, supposition – because I really had no certain idea of what he knew or felt – would only drive me mad. I should, instead, just be glad that he was being halfway civil to me, and that maybe I'd be able to guilt him into doing my share of the dishes for the week in compensation for his mood. There. That was a happy thought. I smiled cautiously.

"So, what was that, then," I finally asked, "our collective time of the month?!"

He hung his head, frowned, and seemed to be collecting his thoughts for a while. I turned the book over in my hands and began flicking through the bibliography. A book is, after all, only as good as its reference material.

"Do you like it, then?"

I almost jumped, I had been so absorbed in studying the lists of authors and titles. The disjointedness and lag of the conversation made me feel as if we were talking between two separate realities. Using paper cups and some string. He didn't seem to be noticing what I was saying.

"Yeah," I answered cautiously, "It seems to be interesting. I'd like to read it through, see how he uses some of these Muggle sources to form his theories."

Snape nodded, and took the book back from me. He walked to the counter, paid for the book, and returned. He put the book back in my hands, which hadn't even dropped to my sides. I couldn't shake the sense of oddness, so I stood there and looked at him blankly.

"It's September 19th, you do realise."

"Oh. It is? I mean, of course it is. Ah... thanks."

It was as if there were so many things to process, to maintain – mortification, guilt, hope, surprise, gratefulness – that I was simply incapable of any conscious thought. My mind sat, blank and silly as thoughts slowly filtered through my sluggish synapses. Even for a Birthday present, the book had been very expensive. Even with my rent to help, he would have had hardly any cash to spare. If it had been anyone else, if it had been Ron, spending that much on a book I'd picked out, I'd believe it was a sign of affection or dedication, or just kindness. But Snape was a little above my level, academically; he would know how much a book worth reading cost. How reasonable this one was priced, all things considered.

He bought books the way that I bought books. Well, the way that I would like to buy books, if I had enough of an income. For content, with price not being an issue at all. Unlike Ron, Harry, even my own parents, who saw my collection as a sweet geekish nuisance, Snape understood. I felt myself smiling wider, as we left the store and walked slowly along the cobbled street.

"Luna's visiting. Let's just go get some lunch."

He nodded, but didn't say anything. He didn't seem as tense, defensive, as he had last few days, but he was still withdrawn and quiet. I hoped that my giddiness wasn't showing too much, my stupid idiot infatuation. Even if he couldn't see it, walking beside me with his eyes on the ground, anybody else who came down the street would. I was so occupied worrying and trying to get myself to think about how I could phrase things right, to apologise for how inappropriate my feelings were, that I dismissed the nudge of his elbow against my own as a subtle redirection towards the nearest cafe.

Diagon Alley had, surprisingly, far more cafes popping up every month. I supposed that the sense of public fear was slowly easing; that it was simply the right time for small food businesses. Doubtless, a lot of pre-graduates were looking for some employment, either until Hogwarts re-opened, or the Ministry stabilised enough to start aggressively hiring all the employees they'd need in the next few years.

I huffed at my own serious thoughts, which were too war-centric for my own liking, on my forgotten birthday. I wasn't going to argue with something other than sandwiches or pub-fare for lunch, especially when I'd had such a foul morning. But as we walked, mute and slow and awkward, his scratchy coat sleeve swiped against the back of my hand. His arm bumped, tentatively and lightly enough that it had to be deliberate, against my own. Half-seconds of not-quite-contact.

As we were almost at the street tables and their fabric umbrellas, his fingers touched mine.

I turned to him, looking up into his shocked eyes, as he shoved his hand into his jacket. He was behaving like Ron had, back in Sixth year. The same way I'd seen Harry with Cho. Snape was acting like a boy who'd never really had any experiences with girls.

I realised, as we silently - and a little awkwardly - drank some wholly disgusting coffee, Snape staring down in deep communion with the menu, that he probably hadn't. Had any experience. Just Lily, and several lifetime's worth of hard shit. I was far more experienced than he was, what with Viktor and Ron...

I was pretty sure that laughter was not called for, but I had to struggle against it. I hid behind my new book, taking deep breaths and trying to get over how ludicrous the whole situation was. I had to get control, because when the bitter, awful coffee ran out, we'd have to order food. Talk. Deal with things. I took another deep breath, lowered my book, and as I opened my mouth, Snape beat me to it.

"I've never..." He winced, left off, and stared at his hands on the table. I decided it was better to let him speak. He gathered his thoughts, and tried again. "Brushed cuffs. I've never done anything like that before." He sounded exhausted as he spoke. "And I haven't had what I'd call a friend in years. Not that you didn't know already, of course, but..."

"But nothing." I said resolutely, when he'd sat silently for far too long. "I mean, Harry told me. I know that there's only one person that you've really been close to, right?"

It was easier for me to bring her up than I had expected. Snape's face showed that it wasn't that easy for him, however. He cleared his throat again, and looked back down at the menu.

"Fuck." I exhaled slowly, trying to find the words to handle the situation. My brain had fled the scene completely, leaving me vacant and stupid and powerless to fix anything. I'd know exactly what I should have said in ten minutes or so, but before then, I'd have traumatised him, spoilt him for any healthy relationships.

"I'm no better than you, you know. Well," I appended, "I do have Ginny some days, when she's not with Harry, and Luna, now she's home. But I'm a gormless, hapless grump who reads too much, and accidentally organised the worst mess of a relationship that _The Prophet_ has had the luck to report on."

I stared down at my own hands, now. He wasn't speaking, wasn't looking up at me, wasn't doing anything.

"I mean, I'm complete balls at brushing cuffs myself. Always have been. And you're my friend. And I'm not going to risk losing you. You're the one person I can say anything to. I can talk to you about _books_!"

We ordered our food, and he barely waited for the waitress, Cho, to walk away before he was staring, hard eyes, right at me. I thought he was angry, but as I spoke, I realised that he was more terrified than anything else.

"What," he hissed, low and quiet and more awful than he'd ever been in the classroom, "if it happens again? If... I can't..."

I felt a fierce cool furious power in my chest. I imagined it was what the Furies felt like, burning for the agony of it.

"Well, I can't, either. So we'll just have to deal with that."

He scoffed.

"And if that means that I have to live with you forever, then you'll just have to deal with that. And fix the washing machine. And we should stop ordering coffee."

He blinked at me, and shook his head slightly. Cho emerged from the cafe door, balancing our plates carefully.

"I know you don't like tea brewed by 'incompetent teenage upstarts', but I know that's at least sixty percent exultation in being an old and picky bastard. If they can't count the five minutes that it takes for your cuppa, they're hardly likely to be able to use an espresso machine without cocking things up."

I lifted and tapped my glass once, heavily, on the small table in emphasis. I had the feeling that the heady strength of my emotions had carried my mouth completely away. Though I had been thinking about the coffee thing for a while now.

Instead of looking furious at me, or even just maintaining his glare, Snape's eyes softened. As Cho set down our food and gave me what was possibly meant as a sympathetic smile, Snape spoke with a much louder and lighter – a safer – voice than before. "Maybe I like my coffee to taste like burnt earwax."

Cho boggled. I felt a little confused. Snape ordered tea, and Cho wandered off with her order pad, looking as if she was torn between laughter and shock. When she was gone, Snape leant in, and smiled slightly.

"You know, when you get angry, you get very bossy."

I would have apologised, but it seemed that with the change in the air between us, whatever awful looming future between us had been sidestepped. I studied my sandwich, wondering how on earth I was supposed to fit the fancy thick bread in my mouth. "Is that a bad thing?" I asked him, trying to sound casual and failing completely.

He shrugged, and started examining his own food. "I think I like it, though I'm not sure if I'll feel that way every time. I might, for example, be livid, when my tea turns out undrinkable."

When it finally did arrive, I had made my way through as much of my meal as I was going to. I poked at the dregs of bread and salad dressing on my plate. Snape made a show of deliberately assembling his cup, only to take one sip and push the saucer victoriously across towards me. "This is abysmal!"

"Don't sound so pleased with yourself." I shook a finger at him, and picked up the cup to take a taste myself. "Eugh. Screw it. Let's go home. You can call Ollivander, tell him I'm chucking a sickie. Then you can make some real tea. I'll take a long, hot shower, and be out in time for a brew worth drinking."

I held my book to my chest, stood abruptly, and apparated home. It was impulsive, and I realised a little too late that I'd left Snape to pay for everything. I sheepishly headed for the stairs, hoping to escape before his current good mood spoiled. But then he was there, with a loud crack.

"I'd object to the unfair division of tasks," he said sternly, "but you'll just argue that it's a birthday privilege. I won't breach that; I'll want to exploit it myself when that day comes."

I smiled, quickly, at him, and headed on up the stairs. I stood in the hot water until I was sure that absolutely everything was rinsed off of my skin. I felt a little fed up with myself, my off-the-wall behaviour. Hot and cold all bloody day! Maybe he liked me, and maybe he didn't. I liked him more than I liked to admit. I was more upset than I felt; I knew that, from my chaotic outbursts earlier.

Pah. I was done with the day, and it was done with me. I dressed in the bathroom, closed my bedroom door decisively between myself and the universe, and lay down to read. It wouldn't solve anything, but it was, as Snape had reminded me, my birthday. I was going to damn well enjoy myself.

After my awful Friday, the weekend was nice. I bullied Snape into fetching curry for dinner that night, and he bullied me into making French toast for Saturday breakfast. We must have exhausted our awkwardness by then, because I found myself realising in the sudden calm of midday that we were settled. Though I still had uncertainties about how unstable we both were internally, those worries could come later. Right then, I was in my home. Comfortable and cluttered and damp and needing repair. It was everything that Grimmauld Place should have been to me. I had finished the first few chapters of my book, and was sitting back in a groaning old armchair, thinking about whether or not magical energy could be measured (let alone exist in simultaneous states before measurement). There was a knock at the door, which was extremely strange. An urgent knocking, which was stranger still.

Who _knew_ that I'd moved in? I hadn't gone to great lengths to conceal it, but I certainly hadn't owled anyone, or called anyone, about it. Other than Ollivander, for obvious reasons, who wouldn't have any reason to drop by; I'd be in at work on Monday, and he could always owl me if he needed something. Had Cho been listening more closely than I'd thought, at the cafe? As far as I knew, Snape hadn't any friends, really. Could it be an ex Death Eater? Perhaps one of the Malfoys?

Snape was in the laundry, knocking about and making noises that I knew meant trouble for any who dared interrupt. The old pipes in the house hissed, gurgled and rattled in the walls. I heaved myself out of the armchair, kept my nice, heavy, hardcover book handy just in case, and opened the door. As it dawned upon me that perhaps a wand would be a more useful weapon against one of Snape's old and nastier acquaintances, a curl of red hair swam into view, and I head a very familiar _mrowl._

Ron was standing on the doorstep, hair mussed, eyes frantic, arms covered in raised scratches. I could see Harry in the driver's seat of Arthur's car, similarly disheveled and grumpy.

I sheepishly set my book down on the floor beside the door, and reached a hand out to gingerly lift Crookshanks' claws from Ron's shirt. He winced as they withdrew.

"Since you aren't coming back, you can bloody well take responsibility for the monster!"

I would have snapped at Ron, but there was something that he had said...

"So, you realise I'm not coming back, then?" My voice came out a lot fainter, more tentative and weak, than I'd have liked. I supposed we were both still raw from everything that had blown up between us.

He nodded, and rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. I could see more scratches from Crooks on the back of his arm.

"Yeah, well... I'd still like to try, between us, y'know. But Ginny's beat it into me that what we had was never that..."

Ron petered off, looking a little paler than I'd expected. Snape was standing behind me. It was upsetting, that I hadn't heard him coming. Was Ron still seeing Snape the Death Eater, or Snape the Potions Master behind me? Hadn't those misconceptions been broken down, in the time we'd all lived together? Perhaps it was just me. Or maybe Ron really did think that Snape and I were...

No. I wasn't allowed to let my mind start on that train of thought, not while I still had to deal with the immediate situation.

A little apprehensive, I turned around, and hefted Crooks in my arms. He was purring, now, and his legs were starting to slip, his weight shifting lower. I resettled him, and looked up into Snape's grumpy eyes.

"So, this is my cat..." I said, lamely.

They regarded each other so solemnly that I almost forgot Ron at the door. As politely as I could, I set Crooks down on the floor, and stepped outside to talk to Ron. "How did you know I was here?"

He shuffled, and shrugged. His hand twitched, as if he'd almost reached out to me, but had decided against it.

"Luna came to dinner the other day. Yesterday. She thought we knew, you see. It was Harry's idea, that we bring you Crooks. Kind of making it official, your being gone. Us accepting it."

I nodded, not quite sure what I could say to that. "Er, thanks."

"Well, that, and he keeps on backing up against the edge of the litter tray, and pissing on the floor. I think he's missed you."

"Yeah, I've missed Crooks, too. Look, you'd better go. Harry's probably bored out of his mind. And thanks for bringing Crooks round."

Ron cleared his throat, nervously. "So, will we catch up sometime?"

"Sure," I said, "why not. You can come over for dinner."

He paled. "Ah, maybe. Not this week, have to help Harry clean out the attic."

He slouched to the car, and I waved goodbye stiffly as Harry reversed. Things wouldn't be right between us for ages, and although I did want to recover our friendship, I could see that it'd be an exhausting, drawn-out, painful process. When I couldn't see the car anymore, I walked back inside with heavy, tired feet.

"Isn't there a way to just skip forward, to a time where everything's fixed?" I sighed, more to myself than to Snape. He ignored me, and walked into the kitchen. I heard the water running, the already familiar and homey sound of the kettle set down on the stove. I followed him through, Crooks at my heels, and rummaged around in the cupboard for an old something that could do as a makeshift water bowl. The boys hadn't, of course, remembered to bring the cat things along with them.

"Sorry about him, by the way. With everything, I'd almost forgotten – almost, Crooks, stop giving me that dirty look – to mention him."

There was always the possibility that Snape would say something about pests, about lease agreements. He might tell me to get rid of Crooks, or to move out. I wasn't sure I was prepared for either.

"You can keep the cat, if you make sure that Potter never comes here again."

It didn't take a second for me to agree. "Deal."

I held out my hand, and we shook firmly on it. His hand was warm and firm around mine, and he held tight. Our eyes were locked, and I have honestly no idea how long we stood there, the moment frozen. It could have been seconds, or minutes. Crooks yowled, and we separated as if nothing untoward had happened at all. I hurried off to the shops to get some cat food, and Snape presumably went back to whatever he had been working on, because I didn't see him for the rest of the evening.


	7. Chapter 6

_Author's note: Disclaimer back at the start, and many thanks to my beta for this chapter, Mad Madame Me._

Chapter 6

Sunday mornings were worse now that Crooks was sleeping at the end of my bed. Though he was a warm furball during the cold night, and kept my toes from escaping the duvet, he was also an entity that interrupted my lazy lie-in with demands for breakfast. He hadn't been pleased with the tinned Muggle stuff I'd brought home the night before, and as I certainly wasn't going to floo somewhere to pick up specialty stuff. I'd done my research, and I knew he could eat it. Even half-Kneazle, he could eat it.

That didn't change the fact that he didn't want to. So I would still have to give up on my lie-in and morning reading, to instead be cold, miserable, and grumped at. Crooks was probably going to wreak havoc in revenge for my thoughtless abandonment of him, on top of it all. I swore, frustrated, under my breath – I've read that it can dull pain, if you swear quickly enough after an injury, and I hoped it would do the same for cold toes in autumn – and heaved out of bed to search for a pair of clean socks.

Socks found, jammed on. A cold wooden hall, feet slippery on the stairs. Eyes bleary. Crooks bumping up against my legs, as if making me almost fall on my arse would get him food any quicker.

"Pah." I mumbled, too sleepy to make any real noises. I fumbled my way downstairs, and my feet finally did slip on the last step as Crooks shouldered past me. He seemed to have no trouble at all, twisting through the strange hidden pathways of Snape's house. He was off and into the kitchen and I was slipping, sliding comically. I leant my weight forwards, braced my hands on the wall that was in front of me, and let my feet fall heavily and painfully onto the floor.

"Fuck!"

I stood there and sulked for a few seconds, out of grumpy, unhappy spite, but realised that I'd better get to feeding Crooks before he yowled Snape awake. I was pretty sure that Snape liked his weekend lie-ins, or at least his early morning peace, because he wasn't in the living room when I gave it a cursory glance. Nor in the kitchen. I couldn't hear any kettle, or tinkering, or pages turning. The only noises in the world, it seemed, were the soft fall of my sore feet on the linoleum floor, and the stuttered protest of the ring-pull on the can of cat food. I slopped the runny mess into Crooks' bowl, and stepped back. He stared at me balefully, and I stared right back.

"I know you could fill yourself up on all the bugs in this place easily enough, mister." I warned him. "We're both too lazy to get you a tasty breakfast. At least I didn't choose the jellied ones, I know you really hate them."

He sneezed at me, and spent several minutes sniffling around the kitchen cabinets, looking disinterested but always circling around the old takeout container I'd decided to use as his bowl. I didn't feel much like asking Ron or Ginny to come drop off his other stuff, and I certainly didn't want to get dressed and go meet Harry somewhere. It would have to do, even if Crooks gave me a dirty look every time the edge of the container rubbed the fur on his neck the wrong way.

I slumped into a rickety chair that had been placed in the kitchen at some point since I'd moved in, and looked down glumly at my feet. They still felt bruised and sad. My eyes were dry, my head was heavy and aching and wanted nothing more than to be asleep. I couldn't even hear Muggle cars; it was that early. That abysmally, awfully, early. I'd forgotten my wand upstairs, and I really couldn't be arsed to try lighting the stove with matches. Did we even _have _matches in this place? We must have, but I was damned if I knew where to look for them.

Anyway, tea was beyond me. Time was beyond me. I planned on steeling myself for an uncomfortable trip back to bed. When I had the energy to do anything steely, which didn't seem remotely possible.

I was so dozy and dazed that it took my mind a good half minute to register the sound of Snape's bedroom door opening and closing again. His feet were bare and made a tacky noise as his skin stuck to the lino. He muttered something, and I heard the sound of that kettle touching base with the left burner deep in my bones. Just the promise of tea, soon, made the world seem less traumatic.

He slumped on the wall beside me, and we listened to it boil slowly. Crooks sat down in a corner and began to bathe himself. I felt tame, domestic, and very upset that I hadn't already got myself back to bed. Snape made tea without a word, once the kettle had begun to whistle. I watched the mugs move across the room, fixated on my first hit of caffeine. My mug had only just been placed in my hands, was being lifted to my lips, when the owl hit the kitchen window.

It scrabbled, made very unimpressed noises, and caused a general racket. I glanced blearily at Snape, but he was more or less occupied with his drink, and didn't seem likely to look up anytime soon. His face was hidden by his hair, which hung rumpled and unbrushed.

"Arsehole bastard" I swore. I'd more or less given up on my feet hurting any less, feeling any less cold. I really was just being crabby. I set my mug down on the bench with a resolute thunk, and didn't look back as I bore down on the window – and the owl – with a glare that was probably quite ferocious.

At least, the owl seemed to think so. It quieted down, extended its leg, and pecked my wrist once as I untied the mail before it shot back up into the sky. I returned to my tea, and drinking it slowly, inspected the mail. It was hard, card, not parchment. Fancy. Glittering obnoxiously, with gold lettering.

_Ms. Granger & Mr. Snape_

No address, just our names. Odd, since most letters, even owl post, required a vague location. That was confusing enough that the Ministry stamp – in gold finery and all – completely escaped my notice.

"Wait, who the hell at the Ministry works weekends?"

My incredulity must have interested him, because he snatched the envelope from my hand so fast I had to steady my tea. It slopped onto my fingers a little, so I made sure to take a good long sip before I paid him any more attention. I was marginally aware of the envelope tearing open.

"More to the point, who the hell at the Ministry thinks we're together?"

I stared at him, forgetting my tea. "What?!"

I grabbed the card back from him. It was an invitation to an official Ministry event, a special dinner for all involved personally in the final battle. The papers had been on about it for weeks, and Luna and Ollivander had been talking about it on Friday; a memorial service at Hogwarts for the Wizarding public, commemorative plaques and souvenir coins, that sort of crud. Things that everyone – even Muggles – used to celebrate victory and grief.

"Oh, it's just that. I thought it was something serious, Severus. But this is just a formality."

"It's a formality that has both our names on it."

I shrugged. "Maybe Harry, or Ollivander, or Luna, or Ron, or that bookstore clerk, or Cho, or... anyone could have found out we were housemates. Anyone could have guessed. Maybe it's just because we live together. Hell, I bet that since the mess after the battle, with Death Eaters and children and Wizards all needing to bej dealt with, there's been some sort of basic tracker on all of us. The Muggles have been testing systems like that for years, now..."

I didn't actually mind the thought that people might see us as a couple. I didn't even mind that Snape had so defensively, so quickly, jumped to that conclusion. What I found most disturbing and suspicious left a sour taste in my mouth. "More importantly, since when has the Ministry been open for business on a Sunday?"

Snape looked at me, and I did my best not to lower my eyes. He had an expression that reminded me of being in Potions class. Of getting the answer wrong. "Obviously, the Owl Postal Service operates on the weekends. The Ministry must be availing themselves of that, to cope with the volume of these cards that must be sent. And," he shook his head sternly, "no more words from you until you've finished your cuppa."

It was still strange to hear him use words like "cuppa" so casually. Even though I was comfortable with him in many other respects. Some of the teacher persona must have been lingering in my mind, all this time, even though I'd thought I was beyond those barriers long ago.

It shouldn't be surprising, anyway. He was an intelligent man; too intelligent to sink into Byronic angst, even after Lily...

He was right. I shouldn't be thinking, until I'd woken up properly. "Deal. I'll sit here, not say anything stupid, while you cook breakfast."

He huffed, turned his back on me, and opened a cupboard, banged about inside with the pots until he emerged triumphant with one just big enough for porridge. "Lazy bint. You're not getting anything special, then."

I shrugged. "You're the one that prefers eggs, you obstinate fucker."

He turned to regard me very seriously for a moment, but I could see a muscle twitching beside his mouth. I wanted to hold out longer, but I couldn't help from laughing. I didn't try to stop, once I started, but I doubt I could have if I'd wanted. After a few seconds, Snape joined me, and we enjoyed a few moments of silliness before I felt breathless, had to stop to breathe, and the mood fell a bit flat.

Snape recovered, and soberly fetched the bag of oats from the pantry cupboard. With his back to me, I couldn't really tell what he was thinking. Whatever it was, he was trying to avoid something. Or he just needed space; it was pretty early in the day for either of us to suffer human contact. I braced myself for the ache in my heels – which was less intense, but still throbbing painful – and headed upstairs to get dressed. Retrieve my wand. Find some books in my pile to lump downstairs, in case he needed space and decided to ignore me for the whole day. Which he did, for part of it, at least. I drafted a note to Harry, about Crook's things. If I sent it Monday morning, hopefully Harry would be able to drop that all off before end of business. If he didn't, I could sneak out a little early to Eeylope's and pick up the necessaries anyway. But it would be nice to save the cash, if I could.

Then, almost on a roll of communicative productivity, I decided to write Ron a letter. It wasn't a very good job, and I was pretty sure that I shouldn't post it then – if at all – but I was glad that I'd finally made an effort to explain myself to him. Conversations hadn't gone well, and he most likely had little to no idea about my actual feelings, my thoughts, my motives. Everything he knew had been shouted from me in anger, or filtered through Harry and Ginny. I had overreacted, I knew. I'd been more upset over my own circumstances, and I hadn't been decent to Ron anymore than he'd been decent to me.

I didn't want to lose one of my oldest friends. I didn't want to make Harry choose between us, either, if things continued. I did my best to be as clear, as honest, and as decent to Ron as I could in the letter. It was, when I re-read it, a biased, emotional, mess of words. I was absolutely not ready to post it.

Writing that took it out of me. I hid it inside one of my Wandmaker's textbooks, and set the whole pile of books down on the floor beside my feet. I sent the quill, ink and parchment back over to the pile of junk I'd found them in, in a corner of the room. Closed my eyes, and took deep slow breaths. Outside the house, I could hear buses and cars and brattish kids rousing slowly. Sunday-slow, like my mind. I really had needed much more sleep than I'd got.

My breath filled my lungs slowly, and slid out again. My hands and feet felt heavy and weighted and full. My arms and legs felt too thin, too weak, to lift them. I should rest a little, regain the energy that I'd lost from thinking about what to write to Ron. I wouldn't open my eyes for a while. Just a little while, until I felt more stable. Then I'd go and see if I'd left my breakfast so late that it'd gone cold and disgusting.

Actually, that was strange. Why hadn't Snape come and interrupted me? Bullied me out of wasting his effort?

In and out. I'd just breathe like this for a moment longer, and then I'd go through, see what was happening with him...

I woke up in the late afternoon. At some point, my leg had shifted, gently hefting the pile of books at my feet into a spray of literature across the floor. My letters to Ron and Harry stuck out of the edge of the Wandmaker's book, looking suspicious and tantalising. I had very little doubts that Snape could have easily tiptoed past during the day, and snuck a look at them. I wasn't that upset at all, at the thought. He knew how I felt about Harry and Ron; I had no secrets to hide there. I supposed that I should have been a little worried, but I truly couldn't have cared less one way or the other.

Knowing for sure that I'd have to make something for myself, and bleary enough from my nap to hate the thought of the effort involved, I compromised to get myself a glass of water. But when I had dragged myself into the kitchen, I noticed that there was a bowl of porridge, _and_ an egg on toast, on the bench, under a stasis charm of some sort. Fresh and hot, and food that I desperately needed.

I turned, found myself some cutlery, and returned. There was a warm soft feeling inside me that was swelling, and I knew that no good would come of it. I tried to tell myself that it would be more sensible to calm down, to give everything time. Time within myself to develop. My feelings were still too raw and fresh. I was worried that they'd come spilling out over themselves.

So I told myself off, and made sure I was calm and clearer headed before I disspelled the stasis. Everything might have been fine, then, but as the spell lifted in a quick smell of burning air, and the scent of the food reached me, a small slip of paper drifted slightly. Caught my eye.

_Too lazy to make your eggish toast properly. Hellspawn is shut in your room, hissing. Potions in laundry, do not disturb._

That brought it all right back. The warmth, the strange feelings pressing up inside. My cheeks burned, and I realised I was starting to blush. Oh god, this wouldn't do at all! This was worse than I had thought. I supposed that I should have seen it coming. It had obviously been building for far longer than I had been aware. Maybe even before the incident with the ring.

Oh, fuck it. I was tired, and hungry, and feeling rotten. I felt awful about feeling good about being taken care of. I kept half-guessing. Maybe he'd done it because he liked me, too. Maybe he did it so that he didn't have to deal with me. So that he could retreat away and not have to handle me for the rest of the day.

"No." I said aloud. I stopped all thought from registering, and simply fed myself. My brain would just keep on making stupid assumptions and bad decisions, when it wasn't fuelled properly. Eating wouldn't fix things, but it might help me see the situation in a better light.

Monday was, in all respects, better. I worried less, because I was busy watching Ollivander complete the next step in the wandmaking process. After weeks of theory and practicing – and failing – with the lathe, interrupted by the occasional customer, we were at the point where we were about to breach the core insertion issue.

From what I'd read, there was controversy that had lasted the entirety of wandmaking history regarding whether it was better to seal the cores into the wood and then lathe the shape, or late the shape, then drill a hole, _then_ seat and seal the core.

"The reason I prefer to do it later," Ollivander had explained, "Is that wood behaves strangely, some days, as do core materials. As you've read, a lot of the importance is in the dialogue between the wizard and the wand, not in the wand itself... and in my mind, the small increase in physical stability from early core installation isn't worth the risk. When you find a flaw in the wood," and here he fished around in a box for an aborted, half-made wand shell, "what do you do? If you change the contours or length, you risk making the wand unstable, or unusable by anyone. If you don't allow the wood to show you how to work it properly – as you learnt last week..."

I blushed, and coughed. Even with a pedaled lathe, everything had moved too fast for my eyes. I'd slipped my skew chisel into a knot that I hadn't noticed when I'd chosen that piece of wood, and the handle had flown from my grasp. Bob had halted the lathe as quickly as he could, and I had backed away, aghast and ashamed, my hands in front of my face.

When I'd lowered them, and found myself facing a small chink in the wand's wood, and a far-flung skew chisel, I'd laughed, but felt a sense of dread. I knew that as a teacher, Ollivander would probably be reminding me about my mistake in future lessons. I'd learn better, remember it clearer. But it wouldn't be pleasant.

"... So as I make the only sensible choice: at Ollivander's, we always test the wood, find the right shape, drill a core-hole, and only _then_ commit ourselves to a final core component. Of course we keep the concept of our ideal cores in mind, but it's a fool who doesn't allow for the innovation that the unforeseen can bring."

I nodded. It made sense, efficient sense, given that wand-selling seemed to rely more on having a huge overstock to suit a variable but loyal customer base. Wood was cheap. We could get tax breaks on the core components. We – and it felt good, to think that I'd become part of Ollivander's so completely that I thought in the plural instinctively – had a good name.

I stood as unobtrusively as I could beside Ollivander, and watched as he treadled the wheel himself now. Bob had vanished to places unknown.

"You'll need Bob's help when you try this, but it's always good for a wandmaker to develop his own appreciation and feel for this part. Because we can't use faster, cleaner, newer Muggle machinery, this needs precision..."

I watched Ollivander settle himself at the speed he wanted. Regarded the turning core. Then, he slowed the speed down further. Reached behind himself and to the left, into a tray that had sat on the bench, full of thin metal skewers, with bent rounded loops on the end. Simple, and confusing; they were hollow, and of varied size.

Then, as I saw him spin the end of one over a candle flame, I realised that I _had,_ in fact, seen things like that before. Knew what they were. Cores, for various components and sizes. I'd spent so long recently trying to memorise customers' wands and names that I'd left a gap in my studies.

It looked like meticulous and frustrating work. Ollivander huffed occasionally as he heated the core, held it steadily to the end of the wand, and pressed gently, turning with his feet, never wavering. He slid it in with such well-practised ease that it was half-done before I realised it. He drew the core back out slowly, carefully, and then rested his arm for a moment.

"A glass of water please, Hermione."

I got it as fast as I could, more than a little concerned. Ollivander was old, had seen more than his fair share of trauma. That his hands hadn't shaken once while focused on the job... I wasn't sure if I, even, could hold up for that long.

He seemed to catch onto my thoughts, as he sipped his water and rested. "Well, a lot of it's just perverse bloody mindedness. You learn from experience – and you will ruin several wands before you are anywhere close to finishing one yourself – that if you stop for more than a few minutes, you lose sense of it. Your control begins to waver. A lot of the cost of the wand is right here. Not in the components, but in making sure that they fit and work together."

I nodded. "So for us, the cost is for the hours of labour, and for those that install the cores earlier, the cost is more lost components, and partly hours of work lost to cockups."

Ollivander smiled gently. "Not how I would have put it, but yes. Exactly." He handed the glass back to me, and brushed his hands dry of any condensation on his trousers. He picked up the core, twiddled it between two fingers, then clasped it by the loop at the end and once again began to turn it in the candle flame. "It's boring now, girl, but just you wait until you're doing it!"

I laughed, a little unsure. I hadn't been bored, but it had been feeling as if it had been taking much longer than it truly was. I had checked my watch. We'd only been hunched over the lathe for fifteen minutes or so. But with the repetition and slow motions involved in retracting and reheating the metal core, it was taking bloody forever.

When he had finally finished, carefully withdrawing with an impossibly perfect and slender wooden core sliding from the metal coring tool, I knew that there was no way at all I could possibly turn out something that good without years of practice. It would be clumsy, bloody work.

I found myself looking at Ollivander's hands, scored and wrinkled with so many old scars that it all blended together. My own were a little worn, from the last few years; from camping and fighting and scrabbling all over Hogwarts castle. It was too late for them, because I'd committed myself to this profession so wholly and completely that retreat was not an option.

Ollivander motioned for me to swap places with him. We shuffled around, and he gently set his cored wand into a naked plain cardboard box beside its own insides.

"We keep the cores to plug the ends properly, right? I'm not even going to _think_ about that. If I have to think about putting things back in, I'll go mad!"

Ollivander laughed softly, a dry sound. He patted my shoulder, and handed me a much thicker solid wand, directed me to choose a much sturdier coring tool from the tray beside me.

"It's easier to heat the smaller ones," he explained, "but until you've done it once, you'll have an easier time with this size. Better to see from odd angles."

I lined the coring tool up, and realised what he'd said. Even with the wand spinning slowly, with Bob resting a calming elf hand on my right leg, the angles of my arms, the tension I had to keep in them, to keep things steady...

I was sweating already, and I hadn't even heated the corer up, yet! I sighed heavily, knowing that Ollivander himself had been in my place once. Learning. Fumbling about.

"Oh, and don't think so much about the recipient for your final project. It's better to just focus on not injuring yourself."

I rotated the corer in the candle flame, scowling at its brightness. I'd have no chance of chasing Snape from my mind now. I should have chosen someone – anyone – else for my first focus. But he'd made sense at the time. Probably because my feelings for him had already been developing. Stewing. Now, when I really just wanted to focus on work for a few hours, before _he_ showed up with our lunch, Ollivander had inadvertently redirected my mind.

It was futile, to keep thinking about him. But I couldn't. The painful, bloody, infuriatingly fiddly task reminded me of trying to negotiate with Snape sometimes. Trying to be nice to the man was sometimes like trying to bore my way through a spinning finger-thick piece of willow with a hollow heated skewer. If I made an error in judgement, or was just unlucky, I'd end up like... shit, like that. With a tiny circular hot nick in my left index finger. It stung, but didn't bleed. Wasn't serious. Just in the way enough to be annoying.

"Like that." I said sourly. I didn't want to think about how many more times I'd hurt myself. I re-heated the corer, which wasn't hard, but would, I knew, soon become a too-often-repeated task, and returned to the core itself. Lined everything up with the hole, which took far too long, and following Ollivander's hushed and brief words of assistance, got back to it. I maintained focus easier, listening to Ollivander's voice, but when he suggested that it might be time to re-heat the core again, and I had spent a good four minutes at least carefully retreating, the internal core broke off and came out with the corer.

I blinked at the ragged-edged scrap of wood, and then peered inside the half-cored wand, at the mess that was inside. I could hardly tell how deep I'd actually made it; the wood had separated and splintered a little. I was too unused to things like this to make an accurate assessment.

The shop door opened. Severus's feet fell quietly in the dust of the front of the shop. Ollivander cheerfully put the kettle on, and I set the corer down in the tray I was using for my tools. Rubbing at the nick on my finger, I stretched a little. It had seemed to take ages when Ollivander had been doing it himself, but when I'd become immersed in the process of it, it was as if I'd found another layer of reality. A smaller, centralised, task-oriented reality.

I wondered if all carpenters and tradesmen felt it, or if it was simply related to the scale of the work involved. Whatever it was, I'd have to learn how to take better care of my back. It was too easy to forget my posture, when I was absorbed in finding the right angle to get my work done.

I rolled my head around on my neck slowly. Took my time standing and making my way over to Ollivander and Severus. They were talking about the Ministry's remembrance ceremonies, and I was more than happy to sit and vegetate while they did so. I sat on a chair beside Severus, and reached out for a mug of tea. Accepted a sandwich without paying much attention. While I tried to focus my eyes on distant places in the room, to rest them a little, and ate, snatches of their conversation reached me.

"I'm not sure I like the idea myself, of standing in a sea of grieving kids." Severus agreed. He rolled his shoulders, and made an unpleasant face. "I made my peace with what I had to do years ago. I've been used to the deaths and I've damn well overdone my period of mourning as it is. _They_ need it. But I don't. Their parents don't. It's just another overblown grab for popular opinion and support from the Ministry."

Ollivander nodded calmly, and balanced his mug on his knee for a moment, leaning forwards to grab another sandwich. "You're only grumpy because you can't bring yourself to skip it."

Severus mumbled something that I didn't quite catch, but from the way he shifted, pulled his shoulder back so that I was more included in their conversation, I guessed dozily his general meaning.

"You don't have to go on my account," I reminded him, "I'm old enough to take care of myself."

Severus snorted. "Barely."

I sat more upright, a little riled. "Is there a problem with that, _Sir_?"

Ollivander cleared his throat, and headed out into the front of the shop. Bob disappeared the teapot to somewhere, and followed. I winced. I could tell, now that I'd scared half the population of the store away, that I had turned cranky in my exhaustion. I hung my head a little, embarrassed, and expected either a confrontation or a lecture from Snape.

"To be honest," he crossed his arms and spoke very seriously, "I have no problems whatsoever with young and bookish women learning to make their way in the world."

I regarded him suspiciously. "You've learnt a lot from teaching girls, Severus. But, my snappishness aside, is it weird at all? I mean, I'm the same age as Harry, and his... I mean, she... er... crap. I mean, isn't it odd, to be sharing a laundry with someone that much younger than you? It only just struck me, that it might be unnerving, you see..."

Severus blinked at me. "Isn't it strange for you?"

"Ah. I see what you mean. Never mind, then. My brain has been drilled out by fiddly metal skewers, you see." I showed him my scratched hands, and shrugged apologetically. People were people, after all, no matter their age. Dolores Umbridge would have been a bratty little shit as a kid, too."

He nodded. "And I'm not going for you as an individual. I'm going for all of you, as students. I've done my mourning, I've sorted it all out, up here." He tapped his head.

"But you lot haven't had the time yet. Given the nature of my behaviour, in that last year, it's probably going to be more important to some than others, that I be there, and look sad and penitent."

I thought about that carefully, looking down at my battered hands. Without thinking, I'd slipped the ring into my pocket before I started to work with the wands. My fingers didn't look incredibly different, but they looked more solid, more real. I wasn't sure if I was quite ready to deal with that. I felt too half-done inside, too incompetent. But I didn't want to make the ring an obvious thing in front of Severus. I sat on my hands before I let myself get too caught up in thinking about it. Before I stared for too long. "So you're going to mourn a different kind of loss."

He shrugged, and nodded without much energy. "Funerals," he said, "are things made by and for the living."

I couldn't really argue with that, though it wasn't something that I'd ever contemplated before. The day, the mourning ceremonies, the presentation of awards, and the lunch and dinner for all invited weren't any use to those who had died for whatever reason.

"Just a ritual, to help our poor scared brains cope with the scariness and horror of death?"

He shook his head. Ollivander, who had obviously been listening in from the front of the store, leaned back into the back room and put in his two bits.

"They're not for fear, dear child. They're for healing, and memories."

Severus nodded. "They're an event that marks things, lets us have a set day for remembering everything. Allows us to talk to others, share stupid little stories. Reconnect."

"Memories, huh." I tapped my feet against the floor, and found myself half looking forwards to seeing all my old surviving classmates again. Being able to discuss the final battle openly, and to just catch up with everyone who'd been too busy. "In a way, then, funerals are more fun than Christmas."

Severus snorted, and gave me a very amused look. "In my family, they've _always_ been more fun, no matter how you look at them."


	8. Chapter 7

_Author Notes: Disclaimer at the start. Many many thanks to my beta, Mad Madame Me._

Chapter 7

I wasn't quite sure what to wear to the ceremony. I'd spent all week gritting my teeth, slowly getting more and more frustrated by woodworking. I was determined to nail down the technique, get at least one wand cored out properly, and I hadn't achieved it yet. Thinking about appropriate clothing was beyond me. I didn't own that much, beyond jeans, t-shirts, jumpers, and school uniforms. None felt really appropriate. The only other thing that I had left was a dress that I'd bought without looking at it, to wear to Dumbledore's rushed funeral.

I looked at it, dubiously. I'd grown a little, put on a bit of weight, now that I wasn't panicking, and gearing up to run for my life. It would probably fit, but I doubted that I'd be comfortable all day long.

Ah, damn it. I wouldn't know until I tried it on. I stripped my towel, shivering in the cooler autumn air, that seemed to be able to cut through any warming spells I cast. I'd have to talk to Severus about getting an oil heater working, before winter turned bad.

I writhed into the dress, which was awkward and painful, but when I was settled, and had reconciled myself to having slightly less stretch and give in my clothes than usual, it wasn't that bad. I thanked my lucky stars that I'd never been one for tight or impractical clothing. My long sleeves and skirt would do well to keep me warm enough, with stockings and a robe.

On a whim, I reached my hand into the wooden box I used to store what little jewelry I had, and scrabbled about for a familiar cold circular coin. I shoved it into the pocket of my robes, and trudged downstairs. Snape was waiting, already efficiently ready, dressed in his usual black gloom. We made for a dark and sombre pair, which I supposed _was_ the point of the day. Most of the attendants would be dressed like this, though I'm sure that some kids would come obstinately sporting their house colours. I personally didn't think it appropriate, remembering old competitions between ourselves. But if they were just kids, I couldn't really hold it against them.

Snape waved the invite at me, reminding me that our scheduled apparition time was approaching. I took a deep breath, clutched my hand around the fake galleon in my pocket, and with a quick nod at him, spun on the spot.

After a dizzyingly gross spin and crack, I found myself blinking and stable on a grassy field near Hogsmeade. Beside me, Severus arrived with a snap, the swirl of his robes the only sign that he'd apparated. Perfection comes with practice, and he had had a lot of that.

I could feel eyes on us, as we made our way across the field towards the thestral carriages that were waiting to collect the arrivals. The snap, crackle and pop of multiple apparitions peppered the landscape around us, and the Floo at the three broomsticks was being used so intensively that the chimneys there were emitting regular puffs of smoke, like a steam train. Snape and I had, presumably, been given priority transport. I imagined so had Harry, Ginny, and all the other teachers and anyone else who had suffered large media coverage in relation to the final battle.

I held my galleon tighter, and felt it cut into my hand a little. Snape had taken off while I'd been looking around and feeling the gazes – some probably not very friendly at all, given recent press – and had already climbed up into one of the carriages. I hurried along, and made it in beside him. I settled down as the thestrals moved off, probably pressed for time. Even as early as it was, there were a lot of people to move onto Hogwarts grounds.

Snape shifted, made more space for me. I stretched my legs out gratefully, smiled at him, and turned to greet our companions.

"Professor Flitwick, hello. Professor Sprout." I smiled at them in greeting. Sprout nodded, smiled, but seemed to be worried. Flitwick was surprisingly stony faced, staring straight at Snape, none of his usual cheer.

I swallowed heavily. How upset Flitwick had been, how affected he had been, by the final two years of Voldemort's terrorism, all came back to me. I'd heard Ginny talking about how he'd cast Severus out of the castle. I had always wondered if Flitwick had really fainted, on the night that Dumbledore had been killed, or if Snape had arranged for something convenient to befall Flitwick.

He would have been doing it to keep Flitwick safe, and protect as many of us as he could. We all knew that now, I imagine. I hoped. But Flitwick might just be taking things personally. Still blaming Severus for all the deaths.

"Severus," Flitwick inclined his head, and then turned to me, his voice stern and warning, "Miss Granger."

"Filius." Severus replied, nodding. "Pomona."

Sprout smiled thinly at Snape, and shot a worried glance at Flitwick, before turning to me. "Miss Granger, I'm glad to hear that you've been extending yourself recently."

I blinked at her, still a little shocked at the coolness in Flitwick's tone. I'd remembered him as a gentle man, who was delighted at his students' achievements. I was used to his smile, not the frown he now wore. "Oh?"

"Kevin Whitby showed me his new wand," she explained, "and I must say, if Ollivander's going to leave his business to anyone, I trust your mind more than any other for the job."

I blushed, and felt a little embarrassed at that. I'd never honestly thought that I'd _take over_ the business, though obviously that would be the only reason a wandmaker would take an apprentice. To preserve the knowledge, and pass on their expertise to a younger generation. I felt the weight of that inheritance, that surety that Sprout had in my potential, fall down on my shoulders. With the emotional tone of the day itself, all our black robes and Flitwick's dislike of Severus, everything felt heavier and harder to bear.

"Thanks." I said, finally, feeling flatter than before, far less glad to be in the carriage. I had been thinking of talking about how nice it was, that we'd ended up together, instead of each of us stuck with family groups or random Ministry employees. But I didn't think it was appropriate now. The only company I was glad of was Snape's, for all that I liked my old teachers. At least the nature of the day gave me an excuse to be withdrawn and flatter than usual.

I forced myself to relax back against the seat cushion, and was immensely grateful when I saw the stones of the castle come into view. Crowds of black-clad people milled around the doors, clumped in groups. Some people, like Molly, were surrounded by family, in tears. Others were glad, clasping each other fiercely, happy to return, happy to feel safe.

The scene didn't appeal to me at all. I found my eyes drifting upwards, to the higher and less spell-scorched areas of the castle. Finding windows and towers and places that looked right and normal. I wanted to see it while I had the chance. To measure the familiar against the awful alien scars that the battle had left in the walls. The restoration would begin, workers brought in, in a month or so; the physical remains would be patched over and fixed, which was a good thing. But I felt a deep and bloody-minded vindication, in seeing the damage.

We had earned that, damnit. _Dumbledore_ had earned it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Flitwick, Snape, and Sprout were all looking upwards, too. Whether out of similar sensibilities to myself, or their own more secret emotions, I had no idea. But the sense of discomfort left me. When the carriage stopped, and we disembarked, we lingered together, reluctant to individually make our ways into the crowd.

With Flitwick in front, following his stern but short pace, we made our way slowly and quietly past the groups. I waved and nodded to some people who called out my name, but mostly I walked with my head down. Following Flitwick was a good excuse to keep my eyes on the ground. Knowing that Sprout and Snape were beside and behind me respectively was supportive in a way that no amount of words could be.

I sighed, in relief, as we were ushered past clamours of teens, and parents, and graduates, into an area of seats that were clustered near the front of the Great Hall. People were beginning to calm down, take their seats. We were shown to our own, in a tidy line between Hargid to the left, and Sinistra to the right. Whoever had been in charge of the seat planning for this section had put a lot of time and thought into the arrangements. As I was smack bang in the middle of the previous teachers, there had been a deliberate effort to keep me beside Severus. It was probably more a consideration for him, than for me. Buffer the exonerated Death Eater with his housemate, and colleagues.

People who would understand, and not jostle him, or insult or question him. The worst had been Flitwick's entirely understandable sullen greeting. And knowing Snape, he would be happier to be snubbed than welcomed with open arms.

I eyed the group of people milling around the platform that had been assembled for the speeches, surrounded with wreaths and tables covered in boxes of medals. The Patil twins were shepherding officious looking people in robes, including the Minister, into their chairs, and handing out sheaves of paper to them all, probably programs. Neville was discussing something with Dennis Creevey.

A lot had been going on, while I'd been keeping my head down in Ollivander's books. It felt a bit abrupt and awful, to realise that the whole world had been moving on out there. Harry, Ginny, and Ron had seemed so static to me, all these months, that the realisation that the world was continuing – that my past classmates had been organising all this – gave me a very surreal feeling. I hadn't meant to become a professional apprentice, lock myself into an occupation, but I had. I didn't mind it at all, either, which was surprising.

Watching Neville defuse whatever Dennis had been upset with, and direct him to a chair with the word PRESS in large black letters on the back, I recognised that Neville was far more competent than I'd ever given him credit for.

"Good to see the boy's finally come into his own." Snape commented beside me. On my other side, Flitwick _hmmed_ thoughtfully.

"Yes, Severus. He lacked direction... it was painful, to watch him trip over his own potential so many times." Flitwick sighed heavily. "It's not a good series of events that led to this, but I'm happy to see some good come of it all."

That gave me a lot to think about. As I sat throughout the heavy hearted words of various officials, and Harry's slightly nervous, pre-written speech, I wondered at the effect that teachers had on their students. The choices they had to make. Do they shepherd a student like Neville, or leave him to face the hardships ahead of him, knowing they'll make him a better person? Do they coddle Harry, knowing that he was beaten and unloved as a child, or do they distance themselves, so that they don't accidentally play favourites?

I wasn't sure I'd be able to trust myself to make those choices. I said so, as we were all stood up and directed to walk towards the stage. We'd been told to be silent, but the awards had started two hours ago; there were too many to give. The ceremony had been too ambitious. Nobody was silent, but the talk was quiet.

"It's impossible." Snape said, softly, his deep voice carrying enough for those near us to hear. "You never know, can never trust yourself. Every night, you mark idiot mistakes on their papers, and second guess yourself. Will this undermine their confidence? Why did they make this stupid error? How do I help them?"

Flitwick nodded. "You can't. That's the hardest part." He looked out across the room, full of bored people, half drifting off, others talking softly together. "You have to swallow all the impotence, your inability to reach that given student, and do the best you can. Then move on to the next one, and the next one, of several hundred."

I boggled. "And that's with a school as small as ours, too."

Sprout shrugged. "You do what you can. But it was alright, really, dear." She stretched around Severus to pat my shoulder comfortingly. "It was worth it, and it was a joy to teach most of you. That was nothing, compared to... well... I... seeing those girls bleed out like that, I..."

I wrapped my fingers around hers on my shoulder, and squeezed as hard as I could. In a way, being a student, having run off, even in the core of the battle, I'd had it easier emotionally than others. I couldn't imagine the effect it had had on everyone.

Sprout pulled away, and we lined up dutifully beside the lectern. I was too overcome by my own thoughts to notice the quick walk and handshake that I was given by the Minister. I was back in my seat before I knew it. Snape was giving me a very worried look. I shrugged, tried to brush his concern off, and pay attention to Harry's words. But Snape wasn't having any of that nonsense. He very obstinately wrapped his fingers around mine, and held onto my hand. A warm solid grip.

It grounded me, a little. Melted the ache in my heart. I'd been trying to comprehend the loss that everyone felt, when it was quite impossible. I should leave them to their own private grief, and focus on my own. My own worries. The people I had lost. And, as Harry was noting in his speech, the people I had gained, too.

Flitwick and I glanced towards each other at the same time, and our eyes met. I saw his eyes travel down to Snape and my linked hands. I waited for his previous frustration to return, but instead he smiled. I had to wait, out of respect for Harry, to the end of his speech. Most people began leaving, for an afternoon tea outside in the grounds. But those of us who had been in the Order, or Dumbledore's Army, or directly involved in the final battle, we were all to stay for a more private dinner.

So we sat, and watched everyone file out. I turned to Flitwick again, on the verge of asking a question, but he beat me to it, saying something that answered almost everything I was curious about.

"I might be upset with Severus, but I'm proud of you. Happy for you. A little in awe of the resilience of youth."

I smiled, genuinely warmed inside, back at him. "Well, we owe it to you, and to ourselves."

He gave me a very stern look, that worried me for a second, before he spoke again.

"Young lady! We have just celebrated the end of a war. You're free, you don't owe anything to anyone!"

He laughed, and I did with him. Our eyes drifted across the room to the journalists that were taking photographs, lingering around Harry and Ginny, asking questions. Skeeter was in there somewhere, being a nuisance, as always.

"I certainly don't owe them anything." I commented wryly. Flitwick patted me on the shoulder. Partly, I think, just because he could. He'd never have managed it if we'd been standing.

"That's the spirit. Now, if you'll excuse me, I should go and say hello to some of my other students."

"Of course. It was great to see you."

When he had left, we all began standing and milling about. House elves tidied chairs away, and the Great Hall slowly re-organised itself into an open room, with small tables for the food that would eventually be served.

The bar that was assembled quickly looked a little out-of-place; we'd never had a Yule Ball with alcohol, after all. But it seemed well-rehearsed enough that I assumed the elves had done something like that before. My eyes drifted back to the gaggle of the press, getting in the way of the house elves, and I noticed Dennis was making his way around the crowd of teachers that I'd ended up in.

I could see that Severus was looking a little tense, and probably wouldn't appreciate the flash of the camera, so I took a few steps back towards him, reaching him just too late to hear the first words that had left Dennis' mouth.

I stepped forwards once more, taking my place beside Severus, and looked quizzically at Dennis.

"So, how long have you two been together?" he asked, all earnest and eager and slightly melancholy.

I should have known better, really I should have, but I simply could not resist. He was Muggle-born, after all. There were very few people who could possibly get the joke, and I assumed that Dennis would be one of them. "Five years, eight months, three days."

Dennis seemed to be confused by that. He started counting on his hand. Severus was giving me an odd and horrified look.

"Oh come on, Dennis, surely you've seen _Spaced_!"

Dennis shrugged, baffled. "You've got me against the wall there, Hermione. Don't think I've heard of that one quite yet."

I waved a hand flippantly at Severus, not wanting to get into a conversation where I tried to explain a Muggle television show, and he obstinately insisted that he knew more than enough about that sort of thing.

"It's immaterial, then." I sighed, and rubbed my fingertips together, wondering how to best explain things. "Dennis, you see, Severus and I, we..."

"Only moved in together a week or so ago." Severus said beside me.

"Oh, well then, congratulations!"

Dennis lifted his camera to his face, snapped a very quick shot of us, and waved goodbye awkwardly before moving off to Neville, who was milling around the drinks table looking a little shell-shocked. He was probably still unused to media attention, and the _Daily Prophet_ had been having a good year for celebrity stories. I couldn't see Harry or Ron or Ginny yet; they were either hiding somewhere away from Dennis, who seemed to be doing his best to compensate for the missing Creevey, or taking their time in arriving.

I turned to Severus, and did my best not to look too astonished or upset. I knew I couldn't hide it in my voice, so I did my best to force a comic fake scandal into my tone. "You're worse at spinning things than Skeeter is."

He shrugged, no smile, and turned away from me to look out across the large, heavy, full room of grieving and exultant students, teachers, parents, and Aurors. "I did, you'll agree, say nothing other than the truth."

I pursed my lips, and suppressed the urge to snap that he most certainly _had_ done more than that. That he'd implied much more. Partly because I half wished the implications were true, after all. Partly because I was realising that any reaction, especially a grumpy one, would only encourage him.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, as the thought hit my mind. "That's why McGonnagal always had those hideous sour looks on her face at formal parties, and the end-of-year feasts. You were baiting her, weren't you!"

Severus didn't shrug, didn't respond at all. I knew I was right.

"I bet you didn't just have fun with her. I bet you made life hell for all the staff."

I was proud. He'd managed to maintain an image of detesting public events, while all the while he was perversely enjoying himself. At the expense, I'd imagine, of most people in the room. "No wonder you didn't try to out-stubborn me. You rampant party animal, you."

That last comment must have been a bit too much. He snorted, shook his head, and walked away without looking back at me once. I did my best to not feel the loss of his company – I lived with the man, for fuck's sake, as he'd happily pointed out – but I was uncomfortably infatuated. I hated it. I detested staring after him, trying not to look like I was watching, and hoping that Ron wouldn't show up while I was alone.

I had too much pride to follow Severus to the bar, so I scanned the room for someone – anyone – else that I could approach and talk to. I was quite lucky, because as I was looking, someone soft and female and about my age barreled into my side, wrapping her arms around me enthusiastically.

"Hermione!"

Luna was exuberant and happy, which was a little strange. I always remembered her as the soft-voiced and cultish teen she'd been. She'd grown up a lot, quickly – we all had – and she was harder, surer.

"Luna, hello."

I turned to face her, and saw Ginny behind her, holding three glasses.

"Hermione, hi."

"Ginny," I smiled at her, still a little uncertain. We'd been so close during school that I felt a little guilty. I hadn't even thought that much, about keeping in contact. I felt pretty rotten, since I'd made an effort to catch up with Ron, despite everything, but not with her. Her smile back was genuine, though. She handed both Luna and me drinks, and leaned forwards conspiratorially.

"I've got one too, now." She tapped a finger against her glass, making a chinking, metal sound.

I did my best to look at it without being too obvious, but Luna bent her shoulders and made very close friends with it. It was far more opulent than the ring Severus had foisted off onto me. Probably because both Harry and Ginny had lived with just a little less than was needed, for most of their lives. It was possibly all Harry, given his history for overspending on friends, though I doubted he'd have had the balls to pick an engagement ring without Ginny's approval.

"I don't technically have one, you know." I protested. "Mine is non-purpose-specific these days. But yours is pretty nice."

Ginny hmmed, and Luna nodded to herself, satisfied about whatever it was she had been investigating.

"It's lovely, Ginny, congratulations."

Ginny blushed, and smiled. She shook her head, and patted Luna on the shoulder. "I'm sorry, it must be obnoxious, Hermione and me all paired off like this."

"_I'm not paired off!"_ I objected. Neither of them listened. Luna smiled brightly at me, and Ginny nodded as if I was being a deliberate fool.

"Oh, I don't care that much about marriage myself," Luna said finally, "there are far more interesting things to think about than sex. Fascinating new mutations in remote species to discover. Did you know, that no work at all has been done on refreshing our magical creature classification system? It literally is nothing more than making silly names up."

I gasped, scandalised. "But Muggles have been using species and sub-groups for at least a hundred years now, and using Latin classifications that are intuitive and descriptive!"

Luna nodded emphatically, her hair bouncing a little with her enthusiasm. Ginny sighed wholeheartedly beside us.

"You're just as bad as each other now. I think I liked it better at school, when you two were at odds with each other. I'm off."

I waved goodbye, and turned back to my conversation with Luna. She'd grown up a lot. She'd become much more interesting. And she was a friend of Ollivander's, had been there with him through torture and unspeakable pain. Anyone who was good for the old man, was certainly good enough for me.

"So," she said, with the eagerness of a true geek, a researcher, "when I'm finished writing up my findings from my trip – I'll show you some pictures later – I'm going to fix it."

"What, all of it?"

She grinned proudly. "I'm going to sort them all, all the magical creatures. By physical, magical, and mental capabilities. It will fix all sorts of issues we have in concept."

"And attitudes towards House Elves and Centaurs," I agreed, "If they can be demonstrably, academically, set-in-concrete established as closer to humans than to other magical creatures."

It was strange exultation, to have finally found someone who understood the need to classify and research and understand things. Of course, my passion was centred in book catalogues and my lifelong passion for sentient rights, while Luna's had come from the thrill of the mysterious and unknown. But that we'd come here, ended up somewhere that we made complete and absolute sense to each other... it was incredible.

I felt as if I could spend the entire evening with her, and not get bored. I would have, willingly, if I hadn't seen Ginny, Harry, and Ron together in a corner, talking. Ron turning on his heel, and walking very purposefully towards the bar. Severus had his back to Ron, and was saying something that had Madam Pomfrey's face contorting from either outrage or hilarity.

I waved goodbye to Luna without looking. She'd see where I was going, and who I was heading towards. Smart girl could figure it out herself. I only hoped I'd get there first, though it didn't look likely. A part of me inside baulked at the thought of facing Ron again, when only a few days ago I'd thought it would be the last I'd see of him in weeks.

I thought I'd have more time than this. I hoped I wouldn't get furious at him, and that my crush on Severus wouldn't make things any messier than they needed to be. I moved around and between people, murmuring greetings to those that tried to detain me. Ron was close, way too close now. He was placing his hand on Severus' arm, but not tugging. His face wasn't angry, it was subdued and looking a little forlorn.

I stopped short at that, and watched in strange detached shock as Severus turned to face Ron. He had a stern face, but it softened on seeing Ron's expression. I wondered what the fuck Ron had said. Severus said something himself, short. Not more than two words. Ron swallowed heavily, and turned around, walked slowly back to Harry's side.

I felt a little weird inside. I'd had a rush of adrenaline. I'd been ready to bear down, fuming, on Ron. But I'd been expecting him to be stupid and obstinate and offensive. I'd expected to be denying that there was anything between myself and Severus, as well, which was an outright lie. Having seen Ron's tired and sore expression, Severus' unnaturally mellow reaction, left me dead in the water. I felt a little lost. The lines had moved, somehow, and I hadn't even been there to hear what had happened. How it had happened.

Slower, now, I walked to Severus' side. He acknowledged me with a sidelong glance, and shifted on his feet so that he was standing close behind me. Just shy of touching.

"Hermione, hello."

I tried to smile, but it felt a little false. I knew that it wouldn't reach my eyes. "Madam Pomfrey."

Severus cleared his throat, a rough sound that was closer to my ears than I had expected. A large heavy hand closed around my shoulder; his arm was almost, but not quite, wrapped around me. I turned my face to look at him. Questioning.

"We'd better get home." he said. I wholeheartedly agreed. I'd had more than my fill of mourning and recounting and photographs.

"Exucse us, then, Poppy."

He steered me out of the hall without any trouble at all. I supposed I must have looked pretty awful. Or maybe there had been a story about the backfiring charm earlier on. I hadn't read any articles about myself or Harry in a long time. We reached the Floo, and arrived home in a crowded, ash-dusty burst.

I sneezed. Sat in a chair.

"You do realise," I said, feeling warmer and safer and a little bit more in control of myself now, "that if they hadn't thought we were together before, they certainly do now."

Severus dropped an old, ratty woolen blanket in my lap and sat down in the chair adjacent to mine. "Oh, certainly."

"I mean," I felt a little flustered. The words just weren't coming properly to me, "... I mean, Ginny and Luna seem to think we're _engaged_!"

I looked at his face, and felt an awful weightlessness and nervous energy in my stomach. This was not an ideal time to get all excited and blushing. Not the right time for crushes at all. Severus' slow smile didn't help in the slightest, either. "I thought that you didn't mind the thought of that."

I blinked. I had said something like that, hadn't I? A while ago now, but I had indeed said so.

"I suppose so."

I was a little caught up in my own thoughts, still half coming down from the weirdness of seeing Ron talking to Severus. I didn't notice that Severus' face was heading towards mine until his nose bumped into my cheekbone. His lips pressed, awkward and dry against mine. He didn't introduce any saliva at all, no tongue. Just pressed his warm, dry lips against mine.

It was the worst best kiss I'd ever had. I breathed in, deeply, and caught the stale sweaty smell of a man who'd spent all day standing in his dress robes. It wasn't something I'd ever thought could be appealing before, but it was him. It wasn't that nice, but it was real and comforting in a way I hadn't thought a smell could be. The same way that the fusty smell of old books was comforting. Smells that meant safety and intimacy.

He still didn't deepen the kiss, didn't move. His breath tickled my lip as it came out his nose. His arm came up tentatively, and wrapped around me, pulled me closer. Moving slowly, as if I was some inexperienced kid.

I almost took affront, before I remembered that Severus himself was probably as inexperienced as a kid. He was certainly inexperienced enough to be unaware that wooden armed chairs and close embraces didn't ideally mix. My arm was cramped, and twisted uncomfortably. I sighed a little, and pulled back reluctantly.

I hadn't even had the time to catch up, mentally. I hadn't quite yet got to thinking that this couldn't possibly be happening. That there was no way Severus was as into me as I was him. I was nowhere near the breathless elation that should have followed, when I realised that he was, actually, ready and eager. Had really taken the first move. I was still lagging a little. I wondered if it was usual, in love, or just for people whose brains had been slammed into by a failed and mind-altering spell.

But he was thinking. I'd only pulled back, gently, enough to give my sore arm some room. He snapped back, elastic, retreating as quickly as he could. His face was red, his eyes were frantic. His hands flopped back into his lap.

"Shit, sorry. I didn't mean to. I mean..." His voice sounded shaky, and I was moving, up out of my chair, and around onto the floor in front of him.

He tried to look away from me, was still mumbling apologetic words, looking more terrified than I'd ever seen him. Even during the final battle, with Voldemort bearing down.

"No, no no no no no no." I said, quickly as I could, hoping it got through to him. It seemed to. He stopped, and looked straight at me.

"My arm," I said, "was cramped." That sounded far more useless and lame than I'd thought it would, but oddly enough it seemed to do the trick.

"Your arm." He repeated.

"Yes, my sodding useless arm."

It sounded like a hiccup at first, but then his shoulders shook. He laughed, harder and louder than I had ever heard before. There seemed to be a small amount of hysteria in him, or maybe it was just incredulity, and my not being used to this sort of behaviour. At some point it softened slightly, and he looked down at me from his chair. He leant forwards, still laughing softly, his face more relaxed and happy than I'd ever seen it before.

He reached down for my arms and tugged gently. I obliged and stood, followed him as he reclined back into his chair, leaning forwards over him. It was the first time that I had ever wished my hair hadn't been tied back. I half wanted it out and long, curtaining us off from the rest of the world, making this moment more intimate than it already was.

He reached a hand up to my chin, presumably to pull me forwards, but he never applied pressure. His fingertips shook a little against my neck. Or maybe I was shaking against him.

Whichever of us it really was, I was sure at the time it was him. That he was still too shy and nervous. That he'd maybe never kissed anyone before, not in a situation like this. So I let my weight carry me forward, let my head hang forwards on my neck, my lips pressed more surely into his than his had to mine.

I felt, rather than heard, his sharp breath in. It was delicious, to be this close to somebody. To feel this giddy and alive. With Ron, it had all just been meat. Flesh pressed up against other flesh for the sake of a false comfort. This was so charged, so full of real, tingling, energy that I felt that my skin couldn't possibly hold all of me in.

I didn't notice the arms of the chair as they dug into my thighs. I noticed that later, when I'd come down from the high of the moment. I simply wanted to be as near, as close, as I could be. His arms had come up around me at some point, and at that moment, as I was opening my mouth slightly against him – wary of any quick movements, in case they broke this glorious experience – they closed tight around my back. Warm, comforting.

He didn't feel electric. He felt like tea and biscuits and dark dusty rooms full of books against me. Even through my dress robes. It was knowing it was him, there, with me. Home. Safe. Everything that I wanted and needed.

His mouth opened under mine. Given his dry, chaste kiss earlier, I hadn't expected that. I tentatively slid my tongue forwards, and found myself learning the taste and feel of Severus. It was easy, far too easy, to kiss him. It wasn't the most technically skilled kiss I had ever had, but I enjoyed it far more than all the rest.

We parted, wetly. My knees were shaking, either from my spinning head, or my leaning awkwardly over him. I had no idea how long we had been kissing for.

"Ah, er, hmm, well." I grinned, couldn't help myself. Too many happy head chemicals rising in my bloodstream. "So. I can't stand around like this all night..."

I backed up a little, hoping that he'd stand, and we could negotiate some truce over his bedroom; my single bed was far too small to be useful. But he just sat there, half-smiling up at me, something strange shining in his eyes.

"I won't be very good at this, at all." He was warning me, but he didn't sound as numb and defensive as usual. I chose to take that as a sign of growing self-confidence. I flicked him in the forehead, and turned to make my way up the stairs.

"As if I'm going to be any better. I've never made love to anyone before, myself."

I had made it to his door, had my hand on the knob, when I heard a loud "Fuck!", and the scuffle of chair and shoes downstairs. I didn't have very long to wait at all.


	9. Epilogue

_Author Notes: Disclaimer at the start. I'm really in the debt of Mad Madame Me, who has been a brilliant beta for more than half of this fic, and who has seen me through to the end._

Epilogue

It was a normal Saturday. Ginny and Luna sat across from me at the small table Severus had begrudgingly fixed a week beforehand. Still a little rickety, but strong enough to hold three mugs and the paper bag of pastries that Fleur had baked and sent along with Ginny.

"Harry and I are so happy now," Ginny gushed, "you have no idea how wonderful honeymoons are!"

I gave her a baleful stare across my tea. She'd been wheedling and prying and offering helpful hints since the memorial dinner. It had been _months_ of wedding planning, guest lists, and happy mother stories.

"I can't wait until you and Severus can..."

"Ginny..." Luna trailed off. We'd both grown sick of trying to explain things to her. As Ginny's friends, we would just have to wait out her joyful obsession with all things matrimonial.

"We won't, though, Ginny."

"Oh, but if you spoke to him, I'm sure he'd propose."

"No, he wouldn't. Neither of us go for that sort of thing. Marriage, engagements, none of that suits us."

"But think of your extended family, of how happy everyone in Wizarding society would be! We haven't had enough good news this year. Even the fall of Voldemort wasn't enough to outweigh all those deaths..."

"I agree that is sad, but really, Ginny. Think of my extended family. Of yours, since you'd be invited. Think about the happiness of Wizarding society!"

Ginny blinked, innocent of understanding in her rosy daydreams. It was Luna who finally broke through to her.

"Think about Snape. It'd be his wedding, after all..."

Ginny's happy expression fell, and she looked down at her own drink. "Well, yes. I suppose that could be one problem. Given his history with his parents, I suppose. And his general distaste for pink roses. Well, flowers of any sort..."

I nodded, glad that Ginny was finally seeing reason. "And think about me. I'd be the bride."

Ginny sighed heavily. "I just want to be able to see you, and maybe one day Luna, as happy as I am."

Luna took a small sweet pastry for herself, and chewed it thoughtfully. "I think you've shared a lot of happiness with me, Ginny. Especially these flibbeterwhatsits."

I heard something bang, loudly, then clatter against the floor. Crooks screamed in an indistinguishably furious yowl, and burst his way out of Severus' workroom. Smoke curled through the open door after him. He vanished in the direction of the stairway, and Ginny watched him with wide eyes.

"I don't know how on earth you can _live_ in a house that has all those twisty bits in it, Hermione."

I shrugged. If I had paid closer attention, I would probably have been able to hear Severus swearing. Insulting his cauldrons and burners. I wondered what he was working on. It had to be interesting, if he hadn't remembered to check the room for Crooks first. "Each to their own, I suppose."

"Hmm, yes."

We sat back, and were silent for a short while. I felt very much at peace. In my house, with my nutty friends. Crooks licking his wounds upstairs, and Severus probably on the verge of storming out here and yelling at someone. I glanced quickly at my bare ring finger, and knew that there could be nobody, anywhere, who was more content with their life than I was.

_Endnote:_

_I began writing this fic when I had just finished a degree, had just got a new casual job, and was generally blissful. Then I was fired, things faltered. As I wrote the final chapters, I was a little concerned that the changes in my life might affect the continuity of tone in the story as a whole. I've been told by my beta and a few test readers that I've pulled it off. But if the pace does falter, or things seem a little off, I apologise profusely, and please do let me know the where and how of it either by review or PM. Thank you for reading to the end of Memories, and hopefully for enjoying yourself.  
_


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